THE ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
TRANSLATED BY T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M.A.
THE ART OF LITERATURE.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE
ON AUTHORSHIP
ON STYLE
ON THE STUDY OF LATIN
ON MEN OF LEARNING
ON THINKING FOR ONESELF
ON SOME FORMS OF LITERATURE
ON CRITICISM
ON REPUTATION
ON GENIUS

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

The
contents of this, as of the other volumes in the series, have been
drawn from Schopenhauer's _Parerga_, and amongst the various subjects
dealt with in that famous collection of essays, Literature holds an
important place. Nor can Schopenhauer's opinions fail to be of special
value when he treats of literary form and method. For, quite apart from
his philosophical pretensions, he claims recognition as a great writer;
he is, indeed, one of the best of the few really excellent
prose-writers of whom Germany can boast. While he is thus particularly
qualified to speak of Literature as an Art, he has also something to
say upon those influences which, outside of his own merits, contribute
so much to an author's success, and are so often undervalued when he
obtains immediate popularity. Schopenhauer's own sore experiences in
the matter of reputation lend an interest to his remarks upon that
subject, although it is too much to ask of human nature that he should
approach it in any dispassionate spirit.

In the following pages
we have observations upon style by one who was a stylist in the best
sense of the word, not affected, nor yet a phrasemonger; on thinking
for oneself by a philosopher who never did anything else; on criticism
by a writer who suffered much from the inability of others to
understand him; on reputation by a candidate who, during the greater
part of his life, deserved without obtaining it; and on genius by one
who was incontestably of the privileged order himself. And whatever may
be thought of some of his opinions on matters of detail--on anonymity,
for instance, or on the question whether good work is never done for
money--there can be no doubt that his general view of literature, and
the conditions under which it flourishes, is perfectly sound.

It
might be thought, perhaps, that remarks which were meant to apply to
the German language would have but little bearing upon one so different
from it as English. This would be a just objection if Schopenhauer
treated literature in a petty spirit, and confined himself to pedantic
inquiries into matters of grammar and etymology, or mere niceties of
phrase. But this is not so. He deals with his subject broadly, and
takes large and general views; nor can anyone who knows anything of the
philosopher suppose this to mean that he is vague and feeble. It is
true that now and again in the course of these essays he makes remarks
which are obviously meant to apply to the failings of certain writers
of his own age and country; but in such a case I have generally given
his sentences a turn, which, while keeping them faithful to the spirit
of the original, secures for them a less restricted range, and makes
Schopenhauer a critic of similar faults in whatever age or country they
may appear. This has been done in spite of a sharp word on page
seventeen of this volume, addressed to translators who dare to revise
their author; but the change is one with which not even Schopenhauer
could quarrel.

It is thus a significant fact--a testimony to the
depth of his insight and, in the main, the justice of his
opinions--that views of literature which appealed to his own immediate
contemporaries, should be found to hold good elsewhere and at a
distance of fifty years. It means that what he had to say was worth
saying; and since it is adapted thus equally to diverse times and
audiences, it is probably of permanent interest.

The intelligent
reader will observe that much of the charm of Schopenhauer's writing
comes from its strongly personal character, and that here he has to do,
not with a mere maker of books, but with a man who thinks for himself
and has no false scruples in putting his meaning plainly upon the page,
or in unmasking sham wherever he finds it. This is nowhere so true as
when he deals with literature; and just as in his treatment of life, he
is no flatterer to men in general, so here he is free and outspoken on
the peculiar failings of authors. At the same time he gives them good
advice. He is particularly happy in recommending restraint in regard to
reading the works of others, and the cultivation of independent
thought; and herein he recalls a saying attributed to Hobbes, who was
not less distinguished as a writer than as a philosopher, to the effect
that "_if he had read as much as other men, he should have been as
ignorant as they_."

Schopenhauer also utters a warning, which we
shall do well to take to heart in these days, against mingling the
pursuit of literature with vulgar aims. If we follow him here, we shall
carefully distinguish between literature as an object of life and
literature as a means of living, between the real love of truth and
beauty, and that detestable false love which looks to the price it will
fetch in the market. I am not referring to those who, while they follow
a useful and honorable calling in bringing literature before the
public, are content to be known as men of business. If, by the help of
some second witch of Endor, we could raise the ghost of Schopenhauer,
it would be interesting to hear his opinion of a certain kind of
literary enterprise which has come into vogue since his day, and now
receives an amount of attention very much beyond its due. We may hazard
a guess at the direction his opinion would take. He would doubtless
show us how this enterprise, which is carried on by self-styled
_literary men_, ends by making literature into a form of merchandise,
and treating it as though it were so much goods to be bought and sold
at a profit, and most likely to produce quick returns if the maker's
name is well known. Nor would it be the ghost of the real Schopenhauer
unless we heard a vigorous denunciation of men who claim a connection
with literature by a servile flattery of successful living authors--the
dead cannot be made to pay--in the hope of appearing to advantage in
their reflected light and turning that advantage into money.

In
order to present the contents of this book in a convenient form, I have
not scrupled to make an arrangement with the chapters somewhat
different from that which exists in the original; so that two or more
subjects which are there dealt with successively in one and the same
chapter, here stand by themselves. In consequence of this, some of the
titles of the sections are not to be found in the original. I may
state, however, that the essays on _Authorship_ and _Style_ and the
latter part of that on _Criticism_ are taken direct from the chapter
headed _Ueber Schriftstellerei und Stil_; and that the remainder of the
essay on _Criticism_, with that of _Reputation_, is supplied by the
remarks _Ueber Urtheil, Kritik, Beifall und Ruhm_. The essays on _The
Study of Latin_, on _Men of Learning_, and on _Some Forms of
Literature_, are taken chiefly from the four sections _Ueber
Gelehrsamkeit und Gelehrte, Ueber Sprache und Worte, Ueber Lesen und
B�cher: Anhang_, and _Zur Metaphysik des Sch�nen_. The essay on
_Thinking for Oneself_ is a rendering of certain remarks under the
heading _Selbstdenken. Genius_ was a favorite subject of speculation
with Schopenhauer, and he often touches upon it in the course of his
works; always, however, to put forth the same theory in regard to it as
may be found in the concluding section of this volume. Though the essay
has little or nothing to do with literary method, the subject of which
it treats is the most needful element of success in literature; and I
have introduced it on that ground. It forms part of a chapter in the
_Parerga_ entitled _Den Intellekt �berhaupt und in jeder Beziehung
betreffende Gedanken: Anhang verwandter Stellen._

It has also
been part of my duty to invent a title for this volume; and I am well
aware that objection may be made to the one I have chosen, on the
ground that in common language it is unusual to speak of literature as
an art, and that to do so is unduly to narrow its meaning and to leave
out of sight its main function as the record of thought. But there is
no reason why the word _Literature_ should not be employed in that
double sense which is allowed to attach to _Painting, Music,
Sculpture_, as signifying either the objective outcome of a certain
mental activity, seeking to express itself in outward form; or else the
particular kind of mental activity in question, and the methods it
follows. And we do, in fact, use it in this latter sense, when we say
of a writer that he pursues literature as a calling. If, then,
literature can be taken to mean a process as well as a result of mental
activity, there can be no error in speaking of it as Art. I use that
term in its broad sense, as meaning skill in the display of thought;
or, more fully, a right use of the rules of applying to the practical
exhibition of thought, with whatever material it may deal. In
connection with literature, this is a sense and an application of the
term which have been sufficiently established by the example of the
great writers of antiquity.

It may be asked, of course, whether
the true thinker, who will always form the soul of the true author,
will not be so much occupied with what he has to say, that it will
appear to him a trivial thing to spend great effort on embellishing the
form in which he delivers it. Literature, to be worthy of the name,
must, it is true, deal with noble matter--the riddle of our existence,
the great facts of life, the changing passions of the human heart, the
discernment of some deep moral truth. It is easy to lay too much stress
upon the mere garment of thought; to be too precise; to give to the
arrangement of words an attention that should rather be paid to the
promotion of fresh ideas. A writer who makes this mistake is like a fop
who spends his little mind in adorning his person. In short, it may be
charged against the view of literature which is taken in calling it an
Art, that, instead of making truth and insight the author's aim, it
favors sciolism and a fantastic and affected style. There is, no doubt,
some justice in the objection; nor have we in our own day, and
especially amongst younger men, any lack of writers who endeavor to win
confidence, not by adding to the stock of ideas in the world, but by
despising the use of plain language. Their faults are not new in the
history of literature; and it is a pleasing sign of Schopenhauer's
insight that a merciless exposure of them, as they existed half a
century ago, is still quite applicable to their modern form.

And
since these writers, who may, in the slang of the hour, be called
"impressionists" in literature, follow their own bad taste in the
manufacture of dainty phrases, devoid of all nerve, and generally with
some quite commonplace meaning, it is all the more necessary to
discriminate carefully between artifice and art.

But although
they may learn something from Schopenhauer's advice, it is not chiefly
to them that it is offered. It is to that great mass of writers, whose
business is to fill the columns of the newspapers and the pages of the
review, and to produce the ton of novels that appear every year. Now
that almost everyone who can hold a pen aspires to be called an author,
it is well to emphasize the fact that literature is an art in some
respects more important than any other. The problem of this art is the
discovery of those qualities of style and treatment which entitled any
work to be called good literature.

It will be safe to warn the
reader at the very outset that, if he wishes to avoid being led astray,
he should in his search for these qualities turn to books that have
stood the test of time.

For such an amount of hasty writing is
done in these days that it is really difficult for anyone who reads
much of it to avoid contracting its faults, and thus gradually coming
to terms of dangerous familiarity with bad methods. This advice will be
especially needful if things that have little or no claim to be called
literature at all--the newspapers, the monthly magazine, and the last
new tale of intrigue or adventure--fill a large measure, if not the
whole, of the time given to reading. Nor are those who are sincerely
anxious to have the best thought in the best language quite free from
danger if they give too much attention to the contemporary authors,
even though these seem to think and write excellently. For one
generation alone is incompetent to decide upon the merits of any author
whatever; and as literature, like all art, is a thing of human
invention, so it can be pronounced good only if it obtains lasting
admiration, by establishing a permanent appeal to mankind's deepest
feeling for truth and beauty.

It is in this sense that
Schopenhauer is perfectly right in holding that neglect of the ancient
classics, which are the best of all models in the art of writing, will
infallibly lead to a degeneration of literature.

And the method
of discovering the best qualities of style, and of forming a theory of
writing, is not to follow some trick or mannerism that happens to
please for the moment, but to study the way in which great authors have
done their best work.

It will be said that Schopenhauer tells us
nothing we did not know before. Perhaps so; as he himself says, the
best things are seldom new. But he puts the old truths in a fresh and
forcible way; and no one who knows anything of good literature will
deny that these truths are just now of very fit application.

It
was probably to meet a real want that, a year or two ago, an ingenious
person succeeded in drawing a great number of English and American
writers into a confession of their literary creed and the art they
adopted in authorship; and the interesting volume in which he gave
these confessions to the world contained some very good advice,
although most of it had been said before in different forms. More
recently a new departure, of very doubtful use, has taken place; and
two books have been issued, which aim, the one at being an author's
manual, the other at giving hints on essays and how to write them.

A glance at these books will probably show that their authors have
still something to learn.

Both
of these ventures seem, unhappily, to be popular; and, although they
may claim a position next-door to that of the present volume I beg to
say that it has no connection with them whatever. Schopenhauer does not
attempt to teach the art of making bricks without straw.

I wish
to take this opportunity of tendering my thanks to a large number of
reviewers for the very gratifying reception given to the earlier
volumes of this series. And I have great pleasure in expressing my
obligations to my friend Mr. W.G. Collingwood, who has looked over most
of my proofs and often given me excellent advice in my effort to turn
Schopenhauer into readable English.

T.B.S.

ON AUTHORSHIP

There
are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the
subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the one
have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth
communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money.
Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be
recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the
greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their
thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating;
again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight
out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is
deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they
betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This
sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for example,
with Lessing in his _Dramaturgie_, and even in many of Jean Paul's
romances. As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book
away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author begins to
write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader;
because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

Writing
for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of
literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he
writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon
it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few
books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is
to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse;
for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper
in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all
come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very
little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares
that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse--_honora y
provecho no caben en un saco_. The reason why Literature is in such a
bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to
make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the
public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the
ruin of language.

A great many bad writers make their whole
living by that foolish mania of the public for reading nothing but what
has just been printed,--journalists, I mean. Truly, a most appropriate
name. In plain language it is _journeymen, day-laborers_!

Again,
it may be said that there are three kinds of authors. First come those
who write without thinking. They write from a full memory, from
reminiscences; it may be, even straight out of other people's books.
This class is the most numerous. Then come those who do their thinking
whilst they are writing. They think in order to write; and there is no
lack of them. Last of all come those authors who think before they
begin to write. They are rare.

Authors of the second class, who
put off their thinking until they come to write, are like a sportsman
who goes forth at random and is not likely to bring very much home. On
the other hand, when an author of the third or rare class writes, it is
like a _battue_. Here the game has been previously captured and shut up
within a very small space; from which it is afterwards let out, so many
at a time, into another space, also confined. The game cannot possibly
escape the sportsman; he has nothing to do but aim and fire--in other
words, write down his thoughts. This is a kind of sport from which a
man has something to show.

But even though the number of those
who really think seriously before they begin to write is small,
extremely few of them think about _the subject itself_: the remainder
think only about the books that have been written on the subject, and
what has been said by others. In order to think at all, such writers
need the more direct and powerful stimulus of having other people's
thoughts before them. These become their immediate theme; and the
result is that they are always under their influence, and so never, in
any real sense of the word, are original. But the former are roused to
thought by the subject itself, to which their thinking is thus
immediately directed. This is the only class that produces writers of
abiding fame.

It must, of course, be understood that I am
speaking here of writers who treat of great subjects; not of writers on
the art of making brandy.

Unless an author takes the material on
which he writes out of his own head, that is to say, from his own
observation, he is not worth reading. Book-manufacturers, compilers,
the common run of history-writers, and many others of the same class,
take their material immediately out of books; and the material goes
straight to their finger-tips without even paying freight or undergoing
examination as it passes through their heads, to say nothing of
elaboration or revision. How very learned many a man would be if he
knew everything that was in his own books! The consequence of this is
that these writers talk in such a loose and vague manner, that the
reader puzzles his brain in vain to understand what it is of which they
are really thinking. They are thinking of nothing. It may now and then
be the case that the book from which they copy has been composed
exactly in the same way: so that writing of this sort is like a plaster
cast of a cast; and in the end, the bare outline of the face, and that,
too, hardly recognizable, is all that is left to your Antinous. Let
compilations be read as seldom as possible. It is difficult to avoid
them altogether; since compilations also include those text-books which
contain in a small space the accumulated knowledge of centuries.

There
is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the
more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an
improvement on what was written before; and that change always means
progress. Real thinkers, men of right judgment, people who are in
earnest with their subject,--these are all exceptions only. Vermin is
the rule everywhere in the world: it is always on the alert, taking the
mature opinions of the thinkers, and industriously seeking to improve
upon them (save the mark!) in its own peculiar way.

If the
reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the
newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under
the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books
have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn
upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not
understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take
their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that
which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old
writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject. The
new writer frequently omits the best things they say, their most
striking illustrations, their happiest remarks; because he does not see
their value or feel how pregnant they are. The only thing that appeals
to him is what is shallow and insipid.

It often happens that an
old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written
for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on
the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by
bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that
he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to
make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful
for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These
innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is
this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as
they think, is to start a paradox. Their sterile heads take naturally
to the path of negation; so they begin to deny truths that have long
been admitted--the vital power, for example, the sympathetic nervous
system, _generatio equivoca_, Bichat's distinction between the working
of the passions and the working of intelligence; or else they want us
to return to crass atomism, and the like. Hence it frequently happens
that _the course of science is retrogressive._

To this class of
writers belong those translators who not only translate their author
but also correct and revise him; a proceeding which always seems to me
impertinent. To such writers I say: Write books yourself which are
worth translating, and leave other people's works as they are!

The
reader should study, if he can, the real authors, the men who have
founded and discovered things; or, at any rate, those who are
recognized as the great masters in every branch of knowledge. Let him
buy second-hand books rather than read their contents in new ones. To
be sure, it is easy to add to any new discovery--_inventis aliquid
addere facile est_; and, therefore, the student, after well mastering
the rudiments of his subject, will have to make himself acquainted with
the more recent additions to the knowledge of it. And, in general, the
following rule may be laid down here as elsewhere: if a thing is new,
it is seldom good; because if it is good, it is only for a short time
new.

What the address is to a letter, the title should be to a
book; in other words, its main object should be to bring the book to
those amongst the public who will take an interest in its contents. It
should, therefore, be expressive; and since by its very nature it must
be short, it should be concise, laconic, pregnant, and if possible give
the contents in one word. A prolix title is bad; and so is one that
says nothing, or is obscure and ambiguous, or even, it may be, false
and misleading; this last may possibly involve the book in the same
fate as overtakes a wrongly addressed letter. The worst titles of all
are those which have been stolen, those, I mean, which have already
been borne by other books; for they are in the first place a
plagiarism, and secondly the most convincing proof of a total lack of
originality in the author. A man who has not enough originality to
invent a new title for his book, will be still less able to give it new
contents. Akin to these stolen titles are those which have been
imitated, that is to say, stolen to the extent of one half; for
instance, long after I had produced my treatise _On Will in Nature_,
Oersted wrote a book entitled _On Mind in Nature_.

A book can
never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and
the value of these will lie either in _the matter about which he has
thought_, or in the _form_ which his thoughts take, in other words,
_what it is that he has thought about it._

The matter of books
is most various; and various also are the several excellences attaching
to books on the score of their matter. By matter I mean everything that
comes within the domain of actual experience; that is to say, the facts
of history and the facts of nature, taken in and by themselves and in
their widest sense. Here it is the _thing_ treated of, which gives its
peculiar character to the book; so that a book can be important,
whoever it was that wrote it.

But in regard to the form, the
peculiar character of a book depends upon the _person_ who wrote it. It
may treat of matters which are accessible to everyone and well known;
but it is the way in which they are treated, what it is that is thought
about them, that gives the book its value; and this comes from its
author. If, then, from this point of view a book is excellent and
beyond comparison, so is its author. It follows that if a writer is
worth reading, his merit rises just in proportion as he owes little to
his matter; therefore, the better known and the more hackneyed this is,
the greater he will be. The three great tragedians of Greece, for
example, all worked at the same subject-matter.

So when a book
is celebrated, care should be taken to note whether it is so on account
of its matter or its form; and a distinction should be made accordingly.

Books
of great importance on account of their matter may proceed from very
ordinary and shallow people, by the fact that they alone have had
access to this matter; books, for instance, which describe journeys in
distant lands, rare natural phenomena, or experiments; or historical
occurrences of which the writers were witnesses, or in connection with
which they have spent much time and trouble in the research and special
study of original documents.

On the other hand, where the matter
is accessible to everyone or very well known, everything will depend
upon the form; and what it is that is thought about the matter will
give the book all the value it possesses. Here only a really
distinguished man will be able to produce anything worth reading; for
the others will think nothing but what anyone else can think. They will
just produce an impress of their own minds; but this is a print of
which everyone possesses the original.

However, the public is
very much more concerned to have matter than form; and for this very
reason it is deficient in any high degree of culture. The public shows
its preference in this respect in the most laughable way when it comes
to deal with poetry; for there it devotes much trouble to the task of
tracking out the actual events or personal circumstances in the life of
the poet which served as the occasion of his various works; nay, these
events and circumstances come in the end to be of greater importance
than the works themselves; and rather than read Goethe himself, people
prefer to read what has been written about him, and to study the legend
of Faust more industriously than the drama of that name. And when
B�rger declared that "people would write learned disquisitions on the
question, Who Leonora really was," we find this literally fulfilled in
Goethe's case; for we now possess a great many learned disquisitions on
Faust and the legend attaching to him. Study of this kind is, and
remains, devoted to the material of the drama alone. To give such
preference to the matter over the form, is as though a man were to take
a fine Etruscan vase, not to admire its shape or coloring, but to make
a chemical analysis of the clay and paint of which it is composed.

The
attempt to produce an effect by means of the material employed--an
attempt which panders to this evil tendency of the public--is most to
be condemned in branches of literature where any merit there may be
lies expressly in the form; I mean, in poetical work. For all that, it
is not rare to find bad dramatists trying to fill the house by means of
the matter about which they write. For example, authors of this kind do
not shrink from putting on the stage any man who is in any way
celebrated, no matter whether his life may have been entirely devoid of
dramatic incident; and sometimes, even, they do not wait until the
persons immediately connected with him are dead.

The distinction
between matter and form to which I am here alluding also holds good of
conversation. The chief qualities which enable a man to converse well
are intelligence, discernment, wit and vivacity: these supply the form
of conversation. But it is not long before attention has to be paid to
the matter of which he speaks; in other words, the subjects about which
it is possible to converse with him--his knowledge. If this is very
small, his conversation will not be worth anything, unless he possesses
the above-named formal qualities in a very exceptional degree; for he
will have nothing to talk about but those facts of life and nature
which everybody knows. It will be just the opposite, however, if a man
is deficient in these formal qualities, but has an amount of knowledge
which lends value to what he says. This value will then depend entirely
upon the matter of his conversation; for, as the Spanish proverb has
it, _mas sabe el necio en su casa, que el sabio en la agena_--a fool
knows more of his own business than a wise man does of others.

ON STYLE

Style
is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the
face. To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be
it never so fine, is not long in arousing disgust and abhorrence,
because it is lifeless; so that even the ugliest living face is better.
Hence those who write in Latin and copy the manner of ancient authors,
may be said to speak through a mask; the reader, it is true, hears what
they say, but he cannot observe their physiognomy too; he cannot see
their _style_. With the Latin works of writers who think for
themselves, the case is different, and their style is visible; writers,
I mean, who have not condescended to any sort of imitation, such as
Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others.
An affectation in style is like making grimaces. Further, the language
in which a man writes is the physiognomy of the nation to which he
belongs; and here there are many hard and fast differences, beginning
from the language of the Greeks, down to that of the Caribbean
islanders.

To form a provincial estimate of the value of a
writer's productions, it is not directly necessary to know the subject
on which he has thought, or what it is that he has said about it; that
would imply a perusal of all his works. It will be enough, in the main,
to know _how_ he has thought. This, which means the essential temper or
general quality of his mind, may be precisely determined by his style.
A man's style shows the _formal_ nature of all his thoughts--the formal
nature which can never change, be the subject or the character of his
thoughts what it may: it is, as it were, the dough out of which all the
contents of his mind are kneaded. When Eulenspiegel was asked how long
it would take to walk to the next village, he gave the seemingly
incongruous answer: _Walk_. He wanted to find out by the man's pace the
distance he would cover in a given time. In the same way, when I have
read a few pages of an author, I know fairly well how far he can bring
me.

Every mediocre writer tries to mask his own natural style,
because in his heart he knows the truth of what I am saying. He is thus
forced, at the outset, to give up any attempt at being frank or
na�ve--a privilege which is thereby reserved for superior minds,
conscious of their own worth, and therefore sure of themselves. What I
mean is that these everyday writers are absolutely unable to resolve
upon writing just as they think; because they have a notion that, were
they to do so, their work might possibly look very childish and simple.
For all that, it would not be without its value. If they would only go
honestly to work, and say, quite simply, the things they have really
thought, and just as they have thought them, these writers would be
readable and, within their own proper sphere, even instructive.

But
instead of that, they try to make the reader believe that their
thoughts have gone much further and deeper than is really the case.
They say what they have to say in long sentences that wind about in a
forced and unnatural way; they coin new words and write prolix periods
which go round and round the thought and wrap it up in a sort of
disguise. They tremble between the two separate aims of communicating
what they want to say and of concealing it. Their object is to dress it
up so that it may look learned or deep, in order to give people the
impression that there is very much more in it than for the moment meets
the eye. They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short,
ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more
than they say,--of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises on
natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold forth
with a deluge of words and the most intolerable diffusiveness, as
though no end of fuss were necessary to make the reader understand the
deep meaning of their sentences, whereas it is some quite simple if not
actually trivial idea,--examples of which may be found in plenty in the
popular works of Fichte, and the philosophical manuals of a hundred
other miserable dunces not worth mentioning; or, again, they try to
write in some particular style which they have been pleased to take up
and think very grand, a style, for example, _par excellence_ profound
and scientific, where the reader is tormented to death by the narcotic
effect of longspun periods without a single idea in them,--such as are
furnished in a special measure by those most impudent of all mortals,
the Hegelians[1]; or it may be that it is an intellectual style they
have striven after, where it seems as though their object were to go
crazy altogether; and so on in many other cases. All these endeavors to
put off the _nascetur ridiculus mus_--to avoid showing the funny little
creature that is born after such mighty throes--often make it difficult
to know what it is that they really mean. And then, too, they write
down words, nay, even whole sentences, without attaching any meaning to
them themselves, but in the hope that someone else will get sense out
of them.

[Footnote 1: In their Hegel-gazette, commonly known as _Jahrb�cher der
wissenschaftlichen Literatur_.]

And
what is at the bottom of all this? Nothing but the untiring effort to
sell words for thoughts; a mode of merchandise that is always trying to
make fresh openings for itself, and by means of odd expressions, turns
of phrase, and combinations of every sort, whether new or used in a new
sense, to produce the appearence of intellect in order to make up for
the very painfully felt lack of it.

It is amusing to see how
writers with this object in view will attempt first one mannerism and
then another, as though they were putting on the mask of intellect!
This mask may possibly deceive the inexperienced for a while, until it
is seen to be a dead thing, with no life in it at all; it is then
laughed at and exchanged for another. Such an author will at one moment
write in a dithyrambic vein, as though he were tipsy; at another, nay,
on the very next page, he will be pompous, severe, profoundly learned
and prolix, stumbling on in the most cumbrous way and chopping up
everything very small; like the late Christian Wolf, only in a modern
dress. Longest of all lasts the mask of unintelligibility; but this is
only in Germany, whither it was introduced by Fichte, perfected by
Schelling, and carried to its highest pitch in Hegel--always with the
best results.

And yet nothing is easier than to write so that no
one can understand; just as contrarily, nothing is more difficult than
to express deep things in such a way that every one must necessarily
grasp them. All the arts and tricks I have been mentioning are rendered
superfluous if the author really has any brains; for that allows him to
show himself as he is, and confirms to all time Horace's maxim that
good sense is the source and origin of good style:

_Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons_.

But
those authors I have named are like certain workers in metal, who try a
hundred different compounds to take the place of gold--the only metal
which can never have any substitute. Rather than do that, there is
nothing against which a writer should be more upon his guard than the
manifest endeavor to exhibit more intellect than he really has; because
this makes the reader suspect that he possesses very little; since it
is always the case that if a man affects anything, whatever it may be,
it is just there that he is deficient.

That is why it is praise
to an author to say that he is _na�ve_; it means that he need not
shrink from showing himself as he is. Generally speaking, to be _na�ve_
is to be attractive; while lack of naturalness is everywhere repulsive.
As a matter of fact we find that every really great writer tries to
express his thoughts as purely, clearly, definitely and shortly as
possible. Simplicity has always been held to be a mark of truth; it is
also a mark of genius. Style receives its beauty from the thought it
expresses; but with sham-thinkers the thoughts are supposed to be fine
because of the style. Style is nothing but the mere silhouette of
thought; and an obscure or bad style means a dull or confused brain.

The
first rule, then, for a good style is that _the author should have
something to say_; nay, this is in itself almost all that is necessary.
Ah, how much it means! The neglect of this rule is a fundamental trait
in the philosophical writing, and, in fact, in all the reflective
literature, of my country, more especially since Fichte. These writers
all let it be seen that they want to appear as though they had
something to say; whereas they have nothing to say. Writing of this
kind was brought in by the pseudo-philosophers at the Universities, and
now it is current everywhere, even among the first literary
notabilities of the age. It is the mother of that strained and vague
style, where there seem to be two or even more meanings in the
sentence; also of that prolix and cumbrous manner of expression, called
_le stile empes�_; again, of that mere waste of words which consists in
pouring them out like a flood; finally, of that trick of concealing the
direst poverty of thought under a farrago of never-ending chatter,
which clacks away like a windmill and quite stupefies one--stuff which
a man may read for hours together without getting hold of a single
clearly expressed and definite idea.[1] However, people are easy-going,
and they have formed the habit of reading page upon page of all sorts
of such verbiage, without having any particular idea of what the author
really means. They fancy it is all as it should be, and fail to
discover that he is writing simply for writing's sake.

[Footnote
1: Select examples of the art of writing in this style are to be found
almost _passim_ in the _Jahrb�cher_ published at Halle, afterwards
called the _Deutschen Jahrb�cher_.]

On the other hand, a good
author, fertile in ideas, soon wins his reader's confidence that, when
he writes, he has really and truly _something to say_; and this gives
the intelligent reader patience to follow him with attention. Such an
author, just because he really has something to say, will never fail to
express himself in the simplest and most straightforward manner;
because his object is to awake the very same thought in the reader that
he has in himself, and no other. So he will be able to affirm with
Boileau that his thoughts are everywhere open to the light of the day,
and that his verse always says something, whether it says it well or
ill:

while
of the writers previously described it may be asserted, in the words of
the same poet, that they talk much and never say anything at
all--_quiparlant beaucoup ne disent jamais rien_.

Another
characteristic of such writers is that they always avoid a positive
assertion wherever they can possibly do so, in order to leave a
loophole for escape in case of need. Hence they never fail to choose
the more _abstract_ way of expressing themselves; whereas intelligent
people use the more _concrete_; because the latter brings things more
within the range of actual demonstration, which is the source of all
evidence.

There are many examples proving this preference for
abstract expression; and a particularly ridiculous one is afforded by
the use of the verb _to condition_ in the sense of _to cause_ or _to
produce_. People say _to condition something_ instead of _to cause it_,
because being abstract and indefinite it says less; it affirms that _A_
cannot happen without _B_, instead of that _A_ is caused by _B_. A back
door is always left open; and this suits people whose secret knowledge
of their own incapacity inspires them with a perpetual terror of all
positive assertion; while with other people it is merely the effect of
that tendency by which everything that is stupid in literature or bad
in life is immediately imitated--a fact proved in either case by the
rapid way in which it spreads. The Englishman uses his own judgment in
what he writes as well as in what he does; but there is no nation of
which this eulogy is less true than of the Germans. The consequence of
this state of things is that the word _cause_ has of late almost
disappeared from the language of literature, and people talk only of
_condition_. The fact is worth mentioning because it is so
characteristically ridiculous.

The very fact that these
commonplace authors are never more than half-conscious when they write,
would be enough to account for their dullness of mind and the tedious
things they produce. I say they are only half-conscious, because they
really do not themselves understand the meaning of the words they use:
they take words ready-made and commit them to memory. Hence when they
write, it is not so much words as whole phrases that they put
together--_phrases banales_. This is the explanation of that palpable
lack of clearly-expressed thought in what they say. The fact is that
they do not possess the die to give this stamp to their writing; clear
thought of their own is just what they have not got. And what do we
find in its place?--a vague, enigmatical intermixture of words, current
phrases, hackneyed terms, and fashionable expressions. The result is
that the foggy stuff they write is like a page printed with very old
type.

On the other hand, an intelligent author really speaks to
us when he writes, and that is why he is able to rouse our interest and
commune with us. It is the intelligent author alone who puts individual
words together with a full consciousness of their meaning, and chooses
them with deliberate design. Consequently, his discourse stands to that
of the writer described above, much as a picture that has been really
painted, to one that has been produced by the use of a stencil. In the
one case, every word, every touch of the brush, has a special purpose;
in the other, all is done mechanically. The same distinction may be
observed in music. For just as Lichtenberg says that Garrick's soul
seemed to be in every muscle in his body, so it is the omnipresence of
intellect that always and everywhere characterizes the work of genius.

I
have alluded to the tediousness which marks the works of these writers;
and in this connection it is to be observed, generally, that
tediousness is of two kinds; objective and subjective. A work is
objectively tedious when it contains the defect in question; that is to
say, when its author has no perfectly clear thought or knowledge to
communicate. For if a man has any clear thought or knowledge in him,
his aim will be to communicate it, and he will direct his energies to
this end; so that the ideas he furnishes are everywhere clearly
expressed. The result is that he is neither diffuse, nor unmeaning, nor
confused, and consequently not tedious. In such a case, even though the
author is at bottom in error, the error is at any rate clearly worked
out and well thought over, so that it is at least formally correct; and
thus some value always attaches to the work. But for the same reason a
work that is objectively tedious is at all times devoid of any value
whatever.

The other kind of tediousness is only relative: a
reader may find a work dull because he has no interest in the question
treated of in it, and this means that his intellect is restricted. The
best work may, therefore, be tedious subjectively, tedious, I mean, to
this or that particular person; just as, contrarity, the worst work may
be subjectively engrossing to this or that particular person who has an
interest in the question treated of, or in the writer of the book.

It
would generally serve writers in good stead if they would see that,
whilst a man should, if possible, think like a great genius, he should
talk the same language as everyone else. Authors should use common
words to say uncommon things. But they do just the opposite. We find
them trying to wrap up trivial ideas in grand words, and to clothe
their very ordinary thoughts in the most extraordinary phrases, the
most far-fetched, unnatural, and out-of-the-way expressions. Their
sentences perpetually stalk about on stilts. They take so much pleasure
in bombast, and write in such a high-flown, bloated, affected,
hyperbolical and acrobatic style that their prototype is Ancient
Pistol, whom his friend Falstaff once impatiently told to say what he
had to say _like a man of this world._[1]

[Footnote 1: _King Henry IV_., Part II. Act v. Sc. 3.]

There
is no expression in any other language exactly answering to the French
_stile empes�_; but the thing itself exists all the more often. When
associated with affectation, it is in literature what assumption of
dignity, grand airs and primeness are in society; and equally
intolerable. Dullness of mind is fond of donning this dress; just as an
ordinary life it is stupid people who like being demure and formal.

An
author who writes in the prim style resembles a man who dresses himself
up in order to avoid being confounded or put on the same level with a
mob--a risk never run by the _gentleman_, even in his worst clothes.
The plebeian may be known by a certain showiness of attire and a wish
to have everything spick and span; and in the same way, the commonplace
person is betrayed by his style.

Nevertheless, an author follows
a false aim if he tries to write exactly as he speaks. There is no
style of writing but should have a certain trace of kinship with the
_epigraphic_ or _monumental_ style, which is, indeed, the ancestor of
all styles. For an author to write as he speaks is just as
reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this
gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him
hardly intelligible.

An obscure and vague manner of expression
is always and everywhere a very bad sign. In ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred it comes from vagueness of thought; and this again almost
always means that there is something radically wrong and incongruous
about the thought itself--in a word, that it is incorrect. When a right
thought springs up in the mind, it strives after expression and is not
long in reaching it; for clear thought easily finds words to fit it. If
a man is capable of thinking anything at all, he is also always able to
express it in clear, intelligible, and unambiguous terms. Those writers
who construct difficult, obscure, involved, and equivocal sentences,
most certainly do not know aright what it is that they want to say:
they have only a dull consciousness of it, which is still in the stage
of struggle to shape itself as thought. Often, indeed, their desire is
to conceal from themselves and others that they really have nothing at
all to say. They wish to appear to know what they do not know, to think
what they do not think, to say what they do not say. If a man has some
real communication to make, which will he choose--an indistinct or a
clear way of expressing himself? Even Quintilian remarks that things
which are said by a highly educated man are often easier to understand
and much clearer; and that the less educated a man is, the more
obscurely he will write--_plerumque accidit ut faciliora sint ad
intelligendum et lucidiora multo que a doctissimo quoque dicuntur_....
_Erit ergo etiam obscurior quo quisque deterior_.

An author
should avoid enigmatical phrases; he should know whether he wants to
say a thing or does not want to say it. It is this indecision of style
that makes so many writers insipid. The only case that offers an
exception to this rule arises when it is necessary to make a remark
that is in some way improper.

As exaggeration generally produces
an effect the opposite of that aimed at; so words, it is true, serve to
make thought intelligible--but only up to a certain point. If words are
heaped up beyond it, the thought becomes more and more obscure again.
To find where the point lies is the problem of style, and the business
of the critical faculty; for a word too much always defeats its
purpose. This is what Voltaire means when he says that _the adjective
is the enemy of the substantive_. But, as we have seen, many people try
to conceal their poverty of thought under a flood of verbiage.

Accordingly
let all redundancy be avoided, all stringing together of remarks which
have no meaning and are not worth perusal. A writer must make a sparing
use of the reader's time, patience and attention; so as to lead him to
believe that his author writes what is worth careful study, and will
reward the time spent upon it. It is always better to omit something
good than to add that which is not worth saying at all. This is the
right application of Hesiod's maxim, [Greek: pleon aemisu
pantos][1]--the half is more than the whole. _Le secret pour �tre
ennuyeux, c'est de tout dire_. Therefore, if possible, the quintessence
only! mere leading thoughts! nothing that the reader would think for
himself. To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere
the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few
words stamps the man of genius.

[Footnote 1: _Works and Days_, 40.]

Truth
is most beautiful undraped; and the impression it makes is deep in
proportion as its expression has been simple. This is so, partly
because it then takes unobstructed possession of the hearer's whole
soul, and leaves him no by-thought to distract him; partly, also,
because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or cheated by the
arts of rhetoric, but that all the effect of what is said comes from
the thing itself. For instance, what declamation on the vanity of human
existence could ever be more telling than the words of Job? _Man that
is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a
shadow, and never continueth in one stay_.

For the same reason
Goethe's na�ve poetry is incomparably greater than Schiller's rhetoric.
It is this, again, that makes many popular songs so affecting. As in
architecture an excess of decoration is to be avoided, so in the art of
literature a writer must guard against all rhetorical finery, all
useless amplification, and all superfluity of expression in general; in
a word, he must strive after _chastity_ of style. Every word that can
be spared is hurtful if it remains. The law of simplicity and na�vet�
holds good of all fine art; for it is quite possible to be at once
simple and sublime.

True brevity of expression consists in
everywhere saying only what is worth saying, and in avoiding tedious
detail about things which everyone can supply for himself. This
involves correct discrimination between what it necessary and what is
superfluous. A writer should never be brief at the expense of being
clear, to say nothing of being grammatical. It shows lamentable want of
judgment to weaken the expression of a thought, or to stunt the meaning
of a period for the sake of using a few words less. But this is the
precise endeavor of that false brevity nowadays so much in vogue, which
proceeds by leaving out useful words and even by sacrificing grammar
and logic. It is not only that such writers spare a word by making a
single verb or adjective do duty for several different periods, so that
the reader, as it were, has to grope his way through them in the dark;
they also practice, in many other respects, an unseemingly economy of
speech, in the effort to effect what they foolishly take to be brevity
of expression and conciseness of style. By omitting something that
might have thrown a light over the whole sentence, they turn it into a
conundrum, which the reader tries to solve by going over it again and
again.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note._--In the original,
Schopenhauer here enters upon a lengthy examination of certain common
errors in the writing and speaking of German. His remarks are addressed
to his own countrymen, and would lose all point, even if they were
intelligible, in an English translation. But for those who practice
their German by conversing or corresponding with Germans, let me
recommend what he there says as a useful corrective to a slipshod
style, such as can easily be contracted if it is assumed that the
natives of a country always know their own language perfectly.]

It
is wealth and weight of thought, and nothing else, that gives brevity
to style, and makes it concise and pregnant. If a writer's ideas are
important, luminous, and generally worth communicating, they will
necessarily furnish matter and substance enough to fill out the periods
which give them expression, and make these in all their parts both
grammatically and verbally complete; and so much will this be the case
that no one will ever find them hollow, empty or feeble. The diction
will everywhere be brief and pregnant, and allow the thought to find
intelligible and easy expression, and even unfold and move about with
grace.

Therefore instead of contracting his words and forms of
speech, let a writer enlarge his thoughts. If a man has been thinned by
illness and finds his clothes too big, it is not by cutting them down,
but by recovering his usual bodily condition, that he ought to make
them fit him again.

Let me here mention an error of style, very
prevalent nowadays, and, in the degraded state of literature and the
neglect of ancient languages, always on the increase; I mean
_subjectivity_. A writer commits this error when he thinks it enough if
he himself knows what he means and wants to say, and takes no thought
for the reader, who is left to get at the bottom of it as best he can.
This is as though the author were holding a monologue; whereas, it
ought to be a dialogue; and a dialogue, too, in which he must express
himself all the more clearly inasmuch as he cannot hear the questions
of his interlocutor.

Style should for this very reason never be
subjective, but _objective_; and it will not be objective unless the
words are so set down that they directly force the reader to think
precisely the same thing as the author thought when he wrote them. Nor
will this result be obtained unless the author has always been careful
to remember that thought so far follows the law of gravity that it
travels from head to paper much more easily than from paper to head; so
that he must assist the latter passage by every means in his power. If
he does this, a writer's words will have a purely objective effect,
like that of a finished picture in oils; whilst the subjective style is
not much more certain in its working than spots on the wall, which look
like figures only to one whose phantasy has been accidentally aroused
by them; other people see nothing but spots and blurs. The difference
in question applies to literary method as a whole; but it is often
established also in particular instances. For example, in a recently
published work I found the following sentence: _I have not written in
order to increase the number of existing books._ This means just the
opposite of what the writer wanted to say, and is nonsense as well.

He
who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does
not attach much importance to his own thoughts. For it is only where a
man is convinced of the truth and importance of his thoughts, that he
feels the enthusiasm necessary for an untiring and assiduous effort to
find the clearest, finest, and strongest expression for them,--just as
for sacred relics or priceless works of art there are provided silvern
or golden receptacles. It was this feeling that led ancient authors,
whose thoughts, expressed in their own words, have lived thousands of
years, and therefore bear the honored title of _classics_, always to
write with care. Plato, indeed, is said to have written the
introduction to his _Republic_ seven times over in different ways.[1]

[Footnote
1: _Translator's Note._--It is a fact worth mentioning that the first
twelve words of the _Republic_ are placed in the exact order which
would be natural in English.]

As neglect of dress betrays want
of respect for the company a man meets, so a hasty, careless, bad style
shows an outrageous lack of regard for the reader, who then rightly
punishes it by refusing to read the book. It is especially amusing to
see reviewers criticising the works of others in their own most
careless style--the style of a hireling. It is as though a judge were
to come into court in dressing-gown and slippers! If I see a man badly
and dirtily dressed, I feel some hesitation, at first, in entering into
conversation with him: and when, on taking up a book, I am struck at
once by the negligence of its style, I put it away.

Good writing
should be governed by the rule that a man can think only one thing
clearly at a time; and, therefore, that he should not be expected to
think two or even more things in one and the same moment. But this is
what is done when a writer breaks up his principal sentence into little
pieces, for the purpose of pushing into the gaps thus made two or three
other thoughts by way of parenthesis; thereby unnecessarily and
wantonly confusing the reader. And here it is again my own countrymen
who are chiefly in fault. That German lends itself to this way of
writing, makes the thing possible, but does not justify it. No prose
reads more easily or pleasantly than French, because, as a rule, it is
free from the error in question. The Frenchman strings his thoughts
together, as far as he can, in the most logical and natural order, and
so lays them before his reader one after the other for convenient
deliberation, so that every one of them may receive undivided
attention. The German, on the other hand, weaves them together into a
sentence which he twists and crosses, and crosses and twists again;
because he wants to say six things all at once, instead of advancing
them one by one. His aim should be to attract and hold the reader's
attention; but, above and beyond neglect of this aim, he demands from
the reader that he shall set the above mentioned rule at defiance, and
think three or four different thoughts at one and the same time; or
since that is impossible, that his thoughts shall succeed each other as
quickly as the vibrations of a cord. In this way an author lays the
foundation of his _stile empes�_, which is then carried to perfection
by the use of high-flown, pompous expressions to communicate the
simplest things, and other artifices of the same kind.

In those
long sentences rich in involved parenthesis, like a box of boxes one
within another, and padded out like roast geese stuffed with apples, it
is really the _memory_ that is chiefly taxed; while it is the
understanding and the judgment which should be called into play,
instead of having their activity thereby actually hindered and
weakened.[1] This kind of sentence furnishes the reader with mere
half-phrases, which he is then called upon to collect carefully and
store up in his memory, as though they were the pieces of a torn
letter, afterwards to be completed and made sense of by the other
halves to which they respectively belong. He is expected to go on
reading for a little without exercising any thought, nay, exerting only
his memory, in the hope that, when he comes to the end of the sentence,
he may see its meaning and so receive something to think about; and he
is thus given a great deal to learn by heart before obtaining anything
to understand. This is manifestly wrong and an abuse of the reader's
patience.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note._--This sentence in
the original is obviously meant to illustrate the fault of which it
speaks. It does so by the use of a construction very common in German,
but happily unknown in English; where, however, the fault itself exists
none the less, though in different form.]

The ordinary writer
has an unmistakable preference for this style, because it causes the
reader to spend time and trouble in understanding that which he would
have understood in a moment without it; and this makes it look as
though the writer had more depth and intelligence than the reader. This
is, indeed, one of those artifices referred to above, by means of which
mediocre authors unconsciously, and as it were by instinct, strive to
conceal their poverty of thought and give an appearance of the
opposite. Their ingenuity in this respect is really astounding.

It
is manifestly against all sound reason to put one thought obliquely on
top of another, as though both together formed a wooden cross. But this
is what is done where a writer interrupts what he has begun to say, for
the purpose of inserting some quite alien matter; thus depositing with
the reader a meaningless half-sentence, and bidding him keep it until
the completion comes. It is much as though a man were to treat his
guests by handing them an empty plate, in the hope of something
appearing upon it. And commas used for a similar purpose belong to the
same family as notes at the foot of the page and parenthesis in the
middle of the text; nay, all three differ only in degree. If
Demosthenes and Cicero occasionally inserted words by ways of
parenthesis, they would have done better to have refrained.

But
this style of writing becomes the height of absurdity when the
parenthesis are not even fitted into the frame of the sentence, but
wedged in so as directly to shatter it. If, for instance, it is an
impertinent thing to interrupt another person when he is speaking, it
is no less impertinent to interrupt oneself. But all bad, careless, and
hasty authors, who scribble with the bread actually before their eyes,
use this style of writing six times on a page, and rejoice in it. It
consists in--it is advisable to give rule and example together,
wherever it is possible--breaking up one phrase in order to glue in
another. Nor is it merely out of laziness that they write thus. They do
it out of stupidity; they think there is a charming _l�g�ret�_ about
it; that it gives life to what they say. No doubt there are a few rare
cases where such a form of sentence may be pardonable.

Few write
in the way in which an architect builds; who, before he sets to work,
sketches out his plan, and thinks it over down to its smallest details.
Nay, most people write only as though they were playing dominoes; and,
as in this game, the pieces are arranged half by design, half by
chance, so it is with the sequence and connection of their sentences.
They only have an idea of what the general shape of their work will be,
and of the aim they set before themselves. Many are ignorant even of
this, and write as the coral-insects build; period joins to period, and
the Lord only knows what the author means.

Life now-a-days goes at a gallop; and the way in which this affects
literature is to make it extremely superficial and slovenly.

The
abolition of Latin as the universal language of learned men, together
with the rise of that provincialism which attaches to national
literatures, has been a real misfortune for the cause of knowledge in
Europe. For it was chiefly through the medium of the Latin language
that a learned public existed in Europe at all--a public to which every
book as it came out directly appealed. The number of minds in the whole
of Europe that are capable of thinking and judging is small, as it is;
but when the audience is broken up and severed by differences of
language, the good these minds can do is very much weakened. This is a
great disadvantage; but a second and worse one will follow, namely,
that the ancient languages will cease to be taught at all. The neglect
of them is rapidly gaining ground both in France and Germany.

If
it should really come to this, then farewell, humanity! farewell, noble
taste and high thinking! The age of barbarism will return, in spite of
railways, telegraphs and balloons. We shall thus in the end lose one
more advantage possessed by all our ancestors. For Latin is not only a
key to the knowledge of Roman antiquity; its also directly opens up to
us the Middle Age in every country in Europe, and modern times as well,
down to about the year 1750. Erigena, for example, in the ninth
century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Raimond Lully in the
thirteenth, with a hundred others, speak straight to us in the very
language that they naturally adopted in thinking of learned matters.

They
thus come quite close to us even at this distance of time: we are in
direct contact with them, and really come to know them. How would it
have been if every one of them spoke in the language that was peculiar
to his time and country? We should not understand even the half of what
they said. A real intellectual contact with them would be impossible.
We should see them like shadows on the farthest horizon, or, may be,
through the translator's telescope.

It was with an eye to the
advantage of writing in Latin that Bacon, as he himself expressly
states, proceeded to translate his _Essays_ into that language, under
the title _Sermones fideles_; at which work Hobbes assisted him.[1]

Here
let me observe, by way of parenthesis, that when patriotism tries to
urge its claims in the domain of knowledge, it commits an offence which
should not be tolerated. For in those purely human questions which
interest all men alike, where truth, insight, beauty, should be of sole
account, what can be more impertinent than to let preference for the
nation to which a man's precious self happens to belong, affect the
balance of judgment, and thus supply a reason for doing violence to
truth and being unjust to the great minds of a foreign country in order
to make much of the smaller minds of one's own! Still, there are
writers in every nation in Europe, who afford examples of this vulgar
feeling. It is this which led Yriarte to caricature them in the
thirty-third of his charming _Literary Fables_.[1]

[Footnote 1:
_Translator's Note._--Tomas de Yriarte (1750-91), a Spanish poet, and
keeper of archives in the War Office at Madrid. His two best known
works are a didactic poem, entitled _La Musica_, and the _Fables_ here
quoted, which satirize the peculiar foibles of literary men. They have
been translated into many languages; into English by Rockliffe (3rd
edition, 1866). The fable in question describes how, at a picnic of the
animals, a discussion arose as to which of them carried off the palm
for superiority of talent. The praises of the ant, the dog, the bee,
and the parrot were sung in turn; but at last the ostrich stood up and
declared for the dromedary. Whereupon the dromedary stood up and
declared for the ostrich. No one could discover the reason for this
mutual compliment. Was it because both were such uncouth beasts, or had
such long necks, or were neither of them particularly clever or
beautiful? or was it because each had a hump? _No_! said the fox, _you
are all wrong. Don't you see they are both foreigners_? Cannot the same
be said of many men of learning?]

In learning a language, the
chief difficulty consists in making acquaintance with every idea which
it expresses, even though it should use words for which there is no
exact equivalent in the mother tongue; and this often happens. In
learning a new language a man has, as it were, to mark out in his mind
the boundaries of quite new spheres of ideas, with the result that
spheres of ideas arise where none were before. Thus he not only learns
words, he gains ideas too.

This is nowhere so much the case as
in learning ancient languages, for the differences they present in
their mode of expression as compared with modern languages is greater
than can be found amongst modern languages as compared with one
another. This is shown by the fact that in translating into Latin,
recourse must be had to quite other turns of phrase than are used in
the original. The thought that is to be translated has to be melted
down and recast; in other words, it must be analyzed and then
recomposed. It is just this process which makes the study of the
ancient languages contribute so much to the education of the mind.

It
follows from this that a man's thought varies according to the language
in which he speaks. His ideas undergo a fresh modification, a different
shading, as it were, in the study of every new language. Hence an
acquaintance with many languages is not only of much indirect
advantage, but it is also a direct means of mental culture, in that it
corrects and matures ideas by giving prominence to their many-sided
nature and their different varieties of meaning, as also that it
increases dexterity of thought; for in the process of learning many
languages, ideas become more and more independent of words. The ancient
languages effect this to a greater degree than the modern, in virtue of
the difference to which I have alluded.

From what I have said,
it is obvious that to imitate the style of the ancients in their own
language, which is so very much superior to ours in point of
grammatical perfection, is the best way of preparing for a skillful and
finished expression of thought in the mother-tongue. Nay, if a man
wants to be a great writer, he must not omit to do this: just as, in
the case of sculpture or painting, the student must educate himself by
copying the great masterpieces of the past, before proceeding to
original work. It is only by learning to write Latin that a man comes
to treat diction as an art. The material in this art is language, which
must therefore be handled with the greatest care and delicacy.

The
result of such study is that a writer will pay keen attention to the
meaning and value of words, their order and connection, their
grammatical forms. He will learn how to weigh them with precision, and
so become an expert in the use of that precious instrument which is
meant not only to express valuable thought, but to preserve it as well.
Further, he will learn to feel respect for the language in which he
writes and thus be saved from any attempt to remodel it by arbitrary
and capricious treatment. Without this schooling, a man's writing may
easily degenerate into mere chatter.

To be entirely ignorant of
the Latin language is like being in a fine country on a misty day. The
horizon is extremely limited. Nothing can be seen clearly except that
which is quite close; a few steps beyond, everything is buried in
obscurity. But the Latinist has a wide view, embracing modern times,
the Middle Age and Antiquity; and his mental horizon is still further
enlarged if he studies Greek or even Sanscrit.

If a man knows no
Latin, he belongs to the vulgar, even though he be a great virtuoso on
the electrical machine and have the base of hydrofluoric acid in his
crucible.

There is no better recreation for the mind than the
study of the ancient classics. Take any one of them into your hand, be
it only for half an hour, and you will feel yourself refreshed,
relieved, purified, ennobled, strengthened; just as though you had
quenched your thirst at some pure spring. Is this the effect of the old
language and its perfect expression, or is it the greatness of the
minds whose works remain unharmed and unweakened by the lapse of a
thousand years? Perhaps both together. But this I know. If the
threatened calamity should ever come, and the ancient languages cease
to be taught, a new literature will arise, of such barbarous, shallow
and worthless stuff as never was seen before.

When one sees the
number and variety of institutions which exist for the purposes of
education, and the vast throng of scholars and masters, one might fancy
the human race to be very much concerned about truth and wisdom. But
here, too, appearances are deceptive. The masters teach in order to
gain money, and strive, not after wisdom, but the outward show and
reputation of it; and the scholars learn, not for the sake of knowledge
and insight, but to be able to chatter and give themselves airs. Every
thirty years a new race comes into the world--a youngster that knows
nothing about anything, and after summarily devouring in all haste the
results of human knowledge as they have been accumulated for thousands
of years, aspires to be thought cleverer than the whole of the past.
For this purpose he goes to the University, and takes to reading
books--new books, as being of his own age and standing. Everything he
reads must be briefly put, must be new! he is new himself. Then he
falls to and criticises. And here I am not taking the slightest account
of studies pursued for the sole object of making a living.

Students,
and learned persons of all sorts and every age, aim as a rule at
acquiring _information_ rather than insight. They pique themselves upon
knowing about everything--stones, plants, battles, experiments, and all
the books in existence. It never occurs to them that information is
only a means of insight, and in itself of little or no value; that it
is his way of _thinking_ that makes a man a philosopher. When I hear of
these portents of learning and their imposing erudition, I sometimes
say to myself: Ah, how little they must have had to think about, to
have been able to read so much! And when I actually find it reported of
the elder Pliny that he was continually reading or being read to, at
table, on a journey, or in his bath, the question forces itself upon my
mind, whether the man was so very lacking in thought of his own that he
had to have alien thought incessantly instilled into him; as though he
were a consumptive patient taking jellies to keep himself alive. And
neither his undiscerning credulity nor his inexpressibly repulsive and
barely intelligible style--which seems like of a man taking notes, and
very economical of paper--is of a kind to give me a high opinion of his
power of independent thought.

We have seen that much reading and
learning is prejudicial to thinking for oneself; and, in the same way,
through much writing and teaching, a man loses the habit of being quite
clear, and therefore thorough, in regard to the things he knows and
understands; simply because he has left himself no time to acquire
clearness or thoroughness. And so, when clear knowledge fails him in
his utterances, he is forced to fill out the gaps with words and
phrases. It is this, and not the dryness of the subject-matter, that
makes most books such tedious reading. There is a saying that a good
cook can make a palatable dish even out of an old shoe; and a good
writer can make the dryest things interesting.

With by far the
largest number of learned men, knowledge is a means, not an end. That
is why they will never achieve any great work; because, to do that, he
who pursues knowledge must pursue it as an end, and treat everything
else, even existence itself, as only a means. For everything which a
man fails to pursue for its own sake is but half-pursued; and true
excellence, no matter in what sphere, can be attained only where the
work has been produced for its own sake alone, and not as a means to
further ends.

And so, too, no one will ever succeed in doing
anything really great and original in the way of thought, who does not
seek to acquire knowledge for himself, and, making this the immediate
object of his studies, decline to trouble himself about the knowledge
of others. But the average man of learning studies for the purpose of
being able to teach and write. His head is like a stomach and
intestines which let the food pass through them undigested. That is
just why his teaching and writing is of so little use. For it is not
upon undigested refuse that people can be nourished, but solely upon
the milk which secretes from the very blood itself.

The wig is
the appropriate symbol of the man of learning, pure and simple. It
adorns the head with a copious quantity of false hair, in lack of one's
own: just as erudition means endowing it with a great mass of alien
thought. This, to be sure, does not clothe the head so well and
naturally, nor is it so generally useful, nor so suited for all
purposes, nor so firmly rooted; nor when alien thought is used up, can
it be immediately replaced by more from the same source, as is the case
with that which springs from soil of one's own. So we find Sterne, in
his _Tristram Shandy_, boldly asserting that _an ounce of a man's own
wit is worth a ton of other people's_.

And in fact the most
profound erudition is no more akin to genius than a collection of dried
plants in like Nature, with its constant flow of new life, ever fresh,
ever young, ever changing. There are no two things more opposed than
the childish na�vet� of an ancient author and the learning of his
commentator.

_Dilettanti, dilettanti!_ This is the slighting way
in which those who pursue any branch of art or learning for the love
and enjoyment of the thing,--_per il loro diletto_, are spoken of by
those who have taken it up for the sake of gain, attracted solely by
the prospect of money. This contempt of theirs comes from the base
belief that no man will seriously devote himself to a subject, unless
he is spurred on to it by want, hunger, or else some form of greed. The
public is of the same way of thinking; and hence its general respect
for professionals and its distrust of _dilettanti_. But the truth is
that the _dilettante_ treats his subject as an end, whereas the
professional, pure and simple, treats it merely as a means. He alone
will be really in earnest about a matter, who has a direct interest
therein, takes to it because he likes it, and pursues it _con amore_.
It is these, and not hirelings, that have always done the greatest work.

In
the republic of letters it is as in other republics; favor is shown to
the plain man--he who goes his way in silence and does not set up to be
cleverer than others. But the abnormal man is looked upon as
threatening danger; people band together against him, and have, oh!
such a majority on their side.

The condition of this republic is
much like that of a small State in America, where every man is intent
only upon his own advantage, and seeks reputation and power for
himself, quite heedless of the general weal, which then goes to ruin.
So it is in the republic of letters; it is himself, and himself alone,
that a man puts forward, because he wants to gain fame. The only thing
in which all agree is in trying to keep down a really eminent man, if
he should chance to show himself, as one who would be a common peril.
From this it is easy to see how it fares with knowledge as a whole.

Between
professors and independent men of learning there has always been from
of old a certain antagonism, which may perhaps be likened to that
existing been dogs and wolves. In virtue of their position, professors
enjoy great facilities for becoming known to their contemporaries.
Contrarily, independent men of learning enjoy, by their position, great
facilities for becoming known to posterity; to which it is necessary
that, amongst other and much rarer gifts, a man should have a certain
leisure and freedom. As mankind takes a long time in finding out on
whom to bestow its attention, they may both work together side by side.

He
who holds a professorship may be said to receive his food in the stall;
and this is the best way with ruminant animals. But he who finds his
food for himself at the hands of Nature is better off in the open field.

Of
human knowledge as a whole and in every branch of it, by far the
largest part exists nowhere but on paper,--I mean, in books, that paper
memory of mankind. Only a small part of it is at any given period
really active in the minds of particular persons. This is due, in the
main, to the brevity and uncertainty of life; but it also comes from
the fact that men are lazy and bent on pleasure. Every generation
attains, on its hasty passage through existence, just so much of human
knowledge as it needs, and then soon disappears. Most men of learning
are very superficial. Then follows a new generation, full of hope, but
ignorant, and with everything to learn from the beginning. It seizes,
in its turn, just so much as it can grasp or find useful on its brief
journey and then too goes its way. How badly it would fare with human
knowledge if it were not for the art of writing and printing! This it
is that makes libraries the only sure and lasting memory of the human
race, for its individual members have all of them but a very limited
and imperfect one. Hence most men of learning as are loth to have their
knowledge examined as merchants to lay bare their books.

Human
knowledge extends on all sides farther than the eye can reach; and of
that which would be generally worth knowing, no one man can possess
even the thousandth part.

All branches of learning have thus
been so much enlarged that he who would "do something" has to pursue no
more than one subject and disregard all others. In his own subject he
will then, it is true, be superior to the vulgar; but in all else he
will belong to it. If we add to this that neglect of the ancient
languages, which is now-a-days on the increase and is doing away with
all general education in the humanities--for a mere smattering of Latin
and Greek is of no use--we shall come to have men of learning who
outside their own subject display an ignorance truly bovine.

An
exclusive specialist of this kind stands on a par with a workman in a
factory, whose whole life is spent in making one particular kind of
screw, or catch, or handle, for some particular instrument or machine,
in which, indeed, he attains incredible dexterity. The specialist may
also be likened to a man who lives in his own house and never leaves
it. There he is perfectly familiar with everything, every little step,
corner, or board; much as Quasimodo in Victor Hugo's _N�tre Dame_ knows
the cathedral; but outside it, all is strange and unknown.

For
true culture in the humanities it is absolutely necessary that a man
should be many-sided and take large views; and for a man of learning in
the higher sense of the word, an extensive acquaintance with history is
needful. He, however, who wishes to be a complete philosopher, must
gather into his head the remotest ends of human knowledge: for where
else could they ever come together?

It is precisely minds of the
first order that will never be specialists. For their very nature is to
make the whole of existence their problem; and this is a subject upon
which they will every one of them in some form provide mankind with a
new revelation. For he alone can deserve the name of genius who takes
the All, the Essential, the Universal, for the theme of his
achievements; not he who spends his life in explaining some special
relation of things one to another.

ON THINKING FOR ONESELF.

A
library may be very large; but if it is in disorder, it is not so
useful as one that is small but well arranged. In the same way, a man
may have a great mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by
thinking it over for himself, it has much less value than a far smaller
amount which he has thoroughly pondered. For it is only when a man
looks at his knowledge from all sides, and combines the things he knows
by comparing truth with truth, that he obtains a complete hold over it
and gets it into his power. A man cannot turn over anything in his mind
unless he knows it; he should, therefore, learn something; but it is
only when he has turned it over that he can be said to know it.

Reading
and learning are things that anyone can do of his own free will; but
not so _thinking_. Thinking must be kindled, like a fire by a draught;
it must be sustained by some interest in the matter in hand. This
interest may be of purely objective kind, or merely subjective. The
latter comes into play only in things that concern us personally.
Objective interest is confined to heads that think by nature; to whom
thinking is as natural as breathing; and they are very rare. This is
why most men of learning show so little of it.

It is incredible
what a different effect is produced upon the mind by thinking for
oneself, as compared with reading. It carries on and intensifies that
original difference in the nature of two minds which leads the one to
think and the other to read. What I mean is that reading forces alien
thoughts upon the mind--thoughts which are as foreign to the drift and
temper in which it may be for the moment, as the seal is to the wax on
which it stamps its imprint. The mind is thus entirely under compulsion
from without; it is driven to think this or that, though for the moment
it may not have the slightest impulse or inclination to do so.

But
when a man thinks for himself, he follows the impulse of his own mind,
which is determined for him at the time, either by his environment or
some particular recollection. The visible world of a man's surroundings
does not, as reading does, impress a _single_ definite thought upon his
mind, but merely gives the matter and occasion which lead him to think
what is appropriate to his nature and present temper. So it is, that
much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a
spring continually under pressure. The safest way of having no thoughts
of one's own is to take up a book every moment one has nothing else to
do. It is this practice which explains why erudition makes most men
more stupid and silly than they are by nature, and prevents their
writings obtaining any measure of success. They remain, in Pope's words:

_For ever reading, never to be read!_[1]

[Footnote 1: _Dunciad_, iii, 194.]

Men
of learning are those who have done their reading in the pages of a
book. Thinkers and men of genius are those who have gone straight to
the book of Nature; it is they who have enlightened the world and
carried humanity further on its way. If a man's thoughts are to have
truth and life in them, they must, after all, be his own fundamental
thoughts; for these are the only ones that he can fully and wholly
understand. To read another's thoughts is like taking the leavings of a
meal to which we have not been invited, or putting on the clothes which
some unknown visitor has laid aside. The thought we read is related to
the thought which springs up in ourselves, as the fossil-impress of
some prehistoric plant to a plant as it buds forth in spring-time.

Reading
is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one's own. It means
putting the mind into leading-strings. The multitude of books serves
only to show how many false paths there are, and how widely astray a
man may wander if he follows any of them. But he who is guided by his
genius, he who thinks for himself, who thinks spontaneously and
exactly, possesses the only compass by which he can steer aright. A man
should read only when his own thoughts stagnate at their source, which
will happen often enough even with the best of minds. On the other
hand, to take up a book for the purpose of scaring away one's own
original thoughts is sin against the Holy Spirit. It is like running
away from Nature to look at a museum of dried plants or gaze at a
landscape in copperplate.

A man may have discovered some portion
of truth or wisdom, after spending a great deal of time and trouble in
thinking it over for himself and adding thought to thought; and it may
sometimes happen that he could have found it all ready to hand in a
book and spared himself the trouble. But even so, it is a hundred times
more valuable if he has acquired it by thinking it out for himself. For
it is only when we gain our knowledge in this way that it enters as an
integral part, a living member, into the whole system of our thought;
that it stands in complete and firm relation with what we know; that it
is understood with all that underlies it and follows from it; that it
wears the color, the precise shade, the distinguishing mark, of our own
way of thinking; that it comes exactly at the right time, just as we
felt the necessity for it; that it stands fast and cannot be forgotten.
This is the perfect application, nay, the interpretation, of Goethe's
advice to earn our inheritance for ourselves so that we may really
possess it:

The
man who thinks for himself, forms his own opinions and learns the
authorities for them only later on, when they serve but to strengthen
his belief in them and in himself. But the book-philosopher starts from
the authorities. He reads other people's books, collects their
opinions, and so forms a whole for himself, which resembles an
automaton made up of anything but flesh and blood. Contrarily, he who
thinks for himself creates a work like a living man as made by Nature.
For the work comes into being as a man does; the thinking mind is
impregnated from without, and it then forms and bears its child.

Truth
that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth,
a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another's flesh; it
adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking
of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This
is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of
learning. The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself
resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the
tone sustained, the color perfectly harmonized; it is true to life. On
the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of
learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colors, which
at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection
and meaning.

Reading is thinking with some one else's head
instead of one's own. To think with one's own head is always to aim at
developing a coherent whole--a system, even though it be not a strictly
complete one; and nothing hinders this so much as too strong a current
of others' thoughts, such as comes of continual reading. These
thoughts, springing every one of them from different minds, belonging
to different systems, and tinged with different colors, never of
themselves flow together into an intellectual whole; they never form a
unity of knowledge, or insight, or conviction; but, rather, fill the
head with a Babylonian confusion of tongues. The mind that is
over-loaded with alien thought is thus deprived of all clear insight,
and is well-nigh disorganized. This is a state of things observable in
many men of learning; and it makes them inferior in sound sense,
correct judgment and practical tact, to many illiterate persons, who,
after obtaining a little knowledge from without, by means of
experience, intercourse with others, and a small amount of reading,
have always subordinated it to, and embodied it with, their own thought.

The
really scientific _thinker_ does the same thing as these illiterate
persons, but on a larger scale. Although he has need of much knowledge,
and so must read a great deal, his mind is nevertheless strong enough
to master it all, to assimilate and incorporate it with the system of
his thoughts, and so to make it fit in with the organic unity of his
insight, which, though vast, is always growing. And in the process, his
own thought, like the bass in an organ, always dominates everything and
is never drowned by other tones, as happens with minds which are full
of mere antiquarian lore; where shreds of music, as it were, in every
key, mingle confusedly, and no fundamental note is heard at all.

Those
who have spent their lives in reading, and taken their wisdom from
books, are like people who have obtained precise information about a
country from the descriptions of many travellers. Such people can tell
a great deal about it; but, after all, they have no connected, clear,
and profound knowledge of its real condition. But those who have spent
their lives in thinking, resemble the travellers themselves; they alone
really know what they are talking about; they are acquainted with the
actual state of affairs, and are quite at home in the subject.

The
thinker stands in the same relation to the ordinary book-philosopher as
an eye-witness does to the historian; he speaks from direct knowledge
of his own. That is why all those who think for themselves come, at
bottom, to much the same conclusion. The differences they present are
due to their different points of view; and when these do not affect the
matter, they all speak alike. They merely express the result of their
own objective perception of things. There are many passages in my works
which I have given to the public only after some hesitation, because of
their paradoxical nature; and afterwards I have experienced a pleasant
surprise in finding the same opinion recorded in the works of great men
who lived long ago.

The book-philosopher merely reports what one
person has said and another meant, or the objections raised by a third,
and so on. He compares different opinions, ponders, criticises, and
tries to get at the truth of the matter; herein on a par with the
critical historian. For instance, he will set out to inquire whether
Leibnitz was not for some time a follower of Spinoza, and questions of
a like nature. The curious student of such matters may find conspicuous
examples of what I mean in Herbart's _Analytical Elucidation of
Morality and Natural Right_, and in the same author's _Letters on
Freedom_. Surprise may be felt that a man of the kind should put
himself to so much trouble; for, on the face of it, if he would only
examine the matter for himself, he would speedily attain his object by
the exercise of a little thought. But there is a small difficulty in
the way. It does not depend upon his own will. A man can always sit
down and read, but not--think. It is with thoughts as with men; they
cannot always be summoned at pleasure; we must wait for them to come.
Thought about a subject must appear of itself, by a happy and
harmonious combination of external stimulus with mental temper and
attention; and it is just that which never seems to come to these
people.

This truth may be illustrated by what happens in the
case of matters affecting our own personal interest. When it is
necessary to come to some resolution in a matter of that kind, we
cannot well sit down at any given moment and think over the merits of
the case and make up our mind; for, if we try to do so, we often find
ourselves unable, at that particular moment, to keep our mind fixed
upon the subject; it wanders off to other things. Aversion to the
matter in question is sometimes to blame for this. In such a case we
should not use force, but wait for the proper frame of mind to come of
itself. It often comes unexpectedly and returns again and again; and
the variety of temper in which we approach it at different moments puts
the matter always in a fresh light. It is this long process which is
understood by the term _a ripe resolution._ For the work of coming to a
resolution must be distributed; and in the process much that is
overlooked at one moment occurs to us at another; and the repugnance
vanishes when we find, as we usually do, on a closer inspection, that
things are not so bad as they seemed.

This rule applies to the
life of the intellect as well as to matters of practice. A man must
wait for the right moment. Not even the greatest mind is capable of
thinking for itself at all times. Hence a great mind does well to spend
its leisure in reading, which, as I have said, is a substitute for
thought; it brings stuff to the mind by letting another person do the
thinking; although that is always done in a manner not our own.
Therefore, a man should not read too much, in order that his mind may
not become accustomed to the substitute and thereby forget the reality;
that it may not form the habit of walking in well-worn paths; nor by
following an alien course of thought grow a stranger to its own. Least
of all should a man quite withdraw his gaze from the real world for the
mere sake of reading; as the impulse and the temper which prompt to
thought of one's own come far oftener from the world of reality than
from the world of books. The real life that a man sees before him is
the natural subject of thought; and in its strength as the primary
element of existence, it can more easily than anything else rouse and
influence the thinking mind.

After these considerations, it will
not be matter for surprise that a man who thinks for himself can easily
be distinguished from the book-philosopher by the very way in which he
talks, by his marked earnestness, and the originality, directness, and
personal conviction that stamp all his thoughts and expressions. The
book-philosopher, on the other hand, lets it be seen that everything he
has is second-hand; that his ideas are like the number and trash of an
old furniture-shop, collected together from all quarters. Mentally, he
is dull and pointless--a copy of a copy. His literary style is made up
of conventional, nay, vulgar phrases, and terms that happen to be
current; in this respect much like a small State where all the money
that circulates is foreign, because it has no coinage of its own.

Mere
experience can as little as reading supply the place of thought. It
stands to thinking in the same relation in which eating stands to
digestion and assimilation. When experience boasts that to its
discoveries alone is due the advancement of the human race, it is as
though the mouth were to claim the whole credit of maintaining the body
in health.

The works of all truly capable minds are
distinguished by a character of _decision_ and _definiteness_, which
means they are clear and free from obscurity. A truly capable mind
always knows definitely and clearly what it is that it wants to
express, whether its medium is prose, verse, or music. Other minds are
not decisive and not definite; and by this they may be known for what
they are.

The characteristic sign of a mind of the highest order
is that it always judges at first hand. Everything it advances is the
result of thinking for itself; and this is everywhere evident by the
way in which it gives its thoughts utterance. Such a mind is like a
Prince. In the realm of intellect its authority is imperial, whereas
the authority of minds of a lower order is delegated only; as may be
seen in their style, which has no independent stamp of its own.

Every
one who really thinks for himself is so far like a monarch. His
position is undelegated and supreme. His judgments, like royal decrees,
spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself.
He acknowledges authority as little as a monarch admits a command; he
subscribes to nothing but what he has himself authorized. The multitude
of common minds, laboring under all sorts of current opinions,
authorities, prejudices, is like the people, which silently obeys the
law and accepts orders from above.

Those who are so zealous and
eager to settle debated questions by citing authorities, are really
glad when they are able to put the understanding and the insight of
others into the field in place of their own, which are wanting. Their
number is legion. For, as Seneca says, there is no man but prefers
belief to the exercise of judgment--_unusquisque mavult credere quam
judicare_. In their controversies such people make a promiscuous use of
the weapon of authority, and strike out at one another with it. If any
one chances to become involved in such a contest, he will do well not
to try reason and argument as a mode of defence; for against a weapon
of that kind these people are like Siegfrieds, with a skin of horn, and
dipped in the flood of incapacity for thinking and judging. They will
meet his attack by bringing up their authorities as a way of abashing
him--_argumentum ad verecundiam_, and then cry out that they have won
the battle.

In the real world, be it never so fair, favorable
and pleasant, we always live subject to the law of gravity which we
have to be constantly overcoming. But in the world of intellect we are
disembodied spirits, held in bondage to no such law, and free from
penury and distress. Thus it is that there exists no happiness on earth
like that which, at the auspicious moment, a fine and fruitful mind
finds in itself.

The presence of a thought is like the presence
of a woman we love. We fancy we shall never forget the thought nor
become indifferent to the dear one. But out of sight, out of mind! The
finest thought runs the risk of being irrevocably forgotten if we do
not write it down, and the darling of being deserted if we do not marry
her.

There are plenty of thoughts which are valuable to the man
who thinks them; but only few of them which have enough strength to
produce repercussive or reflect action--I mean, to win the reader's
sympathy after they have been put on paper.

But still it must
not be forgotten that a true value attaches only to what a man has
thought in the first instance _for his own case_. Thinkers may be
classed according as they think chiefly for their own case or for that
of others. The former are the genuine independent thinkers; they really
think and are really independent; they are the true _philosophers_;
they alone are in earnest. The pleasure and the happiness of their
existence consists in thinking. The others are the _sophists_; they
want to seem that which they are not, and seek their happiness in what
they hope to get from the world. They are in earnest about nothing
else. To which of these two classes a man belongs may be seen by his
whole style and manner. Lichtenberg is an example for the former class;
Herder, there can be no doubt, belongs to the second.

When one
considers how vast and how close to us is _the problem of
existence_--this equivocal, tortured, fleeting, dream-like existence of
ours--so vast and so close that a man no sooner discovers it than it
overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when one sees
how all men, with few and rare exceptions, have no clear consciousness
of the problem, nay, seem to be quite unaware of its presence, but busy
themselves with everything rather than with this, and live on, taking
no thought but for the passing day and the hardly longer span of their
own personal future, either expressly discarding the problem or else
over-ready to come to terms with it by adopting some system of popular
metaphysics and letting it satisfy them; when, I say, one takes all
this to heart, one may come to the opinion that man may be said to be
_a thinking being_ only in a very remote sense, and henceforth feel no
special surprise at any trait of human thoughtlessness or folly; but
know, rather, that the normal man's intellectual range of vision does
indeed extend beyond that of the brute, whose whole existence is, as it
were, a continual present, with no consciousness of the past or the
future, but not such an immeasurable distance as is generally supposed.

This
is, in fact, corroborated by the way in which most men converse; where
their thoughts are found to be chopped up fine, like chaff, so that for
them to spin out a discourse of any length is impossible.

If
this world were peopled by really thinking beings, it could not be that
noise of every kind would be allowed such generous limits, as is the
case with the most horrible and at the same time aimless form of it.[1]
If Nature had meant man to think, she would not have given him ears;
or, at any rate, she would have furnished them with airtight flaps,
such as are the enviable possession of the bat. But, in truth, man is a
poor animal like the rest, and his powers are meant only to maintain
him in the struggle for existence; so he must need keep his ears always
open, to announce of themselves, by night as by day, the approach of
the pursuer.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Schopenhauer
refers to the cracking of whips. See the Essay _On Noise_ in _Studies
in Pessimism_.]

In the drama, which is the most perfect
reflection of human existence, there are three stages in the
presentation of the subject, with a corresponding variety in the design
and scope of the piece.

At the first, which is also the most
common, stage, the drama is never anything more than merely
_interesting_. The persons gain our attention by following their own
aims, which resemble ours; the action advances by means of intrigue and
the play of character and incident; while wit and raillery season the
whole.

At the second stage, the drama becomes _sentimental_.
Sympathy is roused with the hero and, indirectly, with ourselves. The
action takes a pathetic turn; but the end is peaceful and satisfactory.

The
climax is reached with the third stage, which is the most difficult.
There the drama aims at being _tragic_. We are brought face to face
with great suffering and the storm and stress of existence; and the
outcome of it is to show the vanity of all human effort. Deeply moved,
we are either directly prompted to disengage our will from the struggle
of life, or else a chord is struck in us which echoes a similar feeling.

The
beginning, it is said, is always difficult. In the drama it is just the
contrary; for these the difficulty always lies in the end. This is
proved by countless plays which promise very well for the first act or
two, and then become muddled, stick or falter--notoriously so in the
fourth act--and finally conclude in a way that is either forced or
unsatisfactory or else long foreseen by every one. Sometimes, too, the
end is positively revolting, as in Lessing's _Emilia Galotti_, which
sends the spectators home in a temper.

This difficulty in regard
to the end of a play arises partly because it is everywhere easier to
get things into a tangle than to get them out again; partly also
because at the beginning we give the author _carte blanche_ to do as he
likes, but, at the end, make certain definite demands upon him. Thus we
ask for a conclusion that shall be either quite happy or else quite
tragic; whereas human affairs do not easily take so decided a turn; and
then we expect that it shall be natural, fit and proper, unlabored, and
at the same time foreseen by no one.

These remarks are also
applicable to an epic and to a novel; but the more compact nature of
the drama makes the difficulty plainer by increasing it.

_E
nihilo nihil fit_. That nothing can come from nothing is a maxim true
in fine art as elsewhere. In composing an historical picture, a good
artist will use living men as a model, and take the groundwork of the
faces from life; and then proceed to idealize them in point of beauty
or expression. A similar method, I fancy, is adopted by good novelists.
In drawing a character they take a general outline of it from some real
person of their acquaintance, and then idealize and complete it to suit
their purpose.

A novel will be of a high and noble order, the
more it represents of inner, and the less it represents of outer, life;
and the ratio between the two will supply a means of judging any novel,
of whatever kind, from _Tristram Shandy_ down to the crudest and most
sensational tale of knight or robber. _Tristram Shandy_ has, indeed, as
good as no action at all; and there is not much in _La Nouvelle
Helo�se_ and _Wilhelm Meister_. Even _Don Quixote_ has relatively
little; and what there is, very unimportant, and introduced merely for
the sake of fun. And these four are the best of all existing novels.

Consider,
further, the wonderful romances of Jean Paul, and how much inner life
is shown on the narrowest basis of actual event. Even in Walter Scott's
novels there is a great preponderance of inner over outer life, and
incident is never brought in except for the purpose of giving play to
thought and emotion; whereas, in bad novels, incident is there on its
own account. Skill consists in setting the inner life in motion with
the smallest possible array of circumstance; for it is this inner life
that really excites our interest.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make
small ones interesting.

History,
which I like to think of as the contrary of poetry [Greek:
istoroumenon--pepoiaemenon], is for time what geography is for space;
and it is no more to be called a science, in any strict sense of the
word, than is geography, because it does not deal with universal
truths, but only with particular details. History has always been the
favorite study of those who wish to learn something, without having to
face the effort demanded by any branch of real knowledge, which taxes
the intelligence. In our time history is a favorite pursuit; as witness
the numerous books upon the subject which appear every year.

If
the reader cannot help thinking, with me, that history is merely the
constant recurrence of similar things, just as in a kaleidoscope the
same bits of glass are represented, but in different combinations, he
will not be able to share all this lively interest; nor, however, will
he censure it. But there is a ridiculous and absurd claim, made by many
people, to regard history as a part of philosophy, nay, as philosophy
itself; they imagine that history can take its place.

The
preference shown for history by the greater public in all ages may be
illustrated by the kind of conversation which is so much in vogue
everywhere in society. It generally consists in one person relating
something and then another person relating something else; so that in
this way everyone is sure of receiving attention. Both here and in the
case of history it is plain that the mind is occupied with particular
details. But as in science, so also in every worthy conversation, the
mind rises to the consideration of some general truth.

This
objection does not, however, deprive history of its value. Human life
is short and fleeting, and many millions of individuals share in it,
who are swallowed by that monster of oblivion which is waiting for them
with ever-open jaws. It is thus a very thankworthy task to try to
rescue something--the memory of interesting and important events, or
the leading features and personages of some epoch--from the general
shipwreck of the world.

From another point of view, we might
look upon history as the sequel to zoology; for while with all other
animals it is enough to observe the species, with man individuals, and
therefore individual events have to be studied; because every man
possesses a character as an individual. And since individuals and
events are without number or end, an essential imperfection attaches to
history. In the study of it, all that a man learns never contributes to
lessen that which he has still to learn. With any real science, a
perfection of knowledge is, at any rate, conceivable.

When we
gain access to the histories of China and of India, the endlessness of
the subject-matter will reveal to us the defects in the study, and
force our historians to see that the object of science is to recognize
the many in the one, to perceive the rules in any given example, and to
apply to the life of nations a knowledge of mankind; not to go on
counting up facts _ad infinitum_.

There are two kinds of
history; the history of politics and the history of literature and art.
The one is the history of the will; the other, that of the intellect.
The first is a tale of woe, even of terror: it is a record of agony,
struggle, fraud, and horrible murder _en masse_. The second is
everywhere pleasing and serene, like the intellect when left to itself,
even though its path be one of error. Its chief branch is the history
of philosophy. This is, in fact, its fundamental bass, and the notes of
it are heard even in the other kind of history. These deep tones guide
the formation of opinion, and opinion rules the world. Hence
philosophy, rightly understood, is a material force of the most
powerful kind, though very slow in its working. The philosophy of a
period is thus the fundamental bass of its history.

The
NEWSPAPER, is the second-hand in the clock of history; and it is not
only made of baser metal than those which point to the minute and the
hour, but it seldom goes right.

The so-called leading article is the chorus to the drama of passing
events.

Exaggeration
of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic
art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as
possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of
their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to
what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs,
they immediately set up a shrill bark.

Therefore, let us
carefully regulate the attention to be paid to this trumpet of danger,
so that it may not disturb our digestion. Let us recognize that a
newspaper is at best but a magnifying-glass, and very often merely a
shadow on the wall.

The _pen_ is to thought what the stick is to
walking; but you walk most easily when you have no stick, and you think
with the greatest perfection when you have no pen in your hand. It is
only when a man begins to be old that he likes to use a stick and is
glad to take up his pen.

When an _hypothesis_ has once come to
birth in the mind, or gained a footing there, it leads a life so far
comparable with the life of an organism, as that it assimilates matter
from the outer world only when it is like in kind with it and
beneficial; and when, contrarily, such matter is not like in kind but
hurtful, the hypothesis, equally with the organism, throws it off, or,
if forced to take it, gets rid of it again entire.

To gain
_immortality_ an author must possess so many excellences that while it
will not be easy to find anyone to understand and appreciate them all,
there will be men in every age who are able to recognize and value some
of them. In this way the credit of his book will be maintained
throughout the long course of centuries, in spite of the fact that
human interests are always changing.

An author like this, who
has a claim to the continuance of his life even with posterity, can
only be a man who, over the wide earth, will seek his like in vain, and
offer a palpable contrast with everyone else in virtue of his
unmistakable distinction. Nay, more: were he, like the wandering Jew,
to live through several generations, he would still remain in the same
superior position. If this were not so, it would be difficult to see
why his thoughts should not perish like those of other men.

_Metaphors_
and _similes_ are of great value, in so far as they explain an unknown
relation by a known one. Even the more detailed simile which grows into
a parable or an allegory, is nothing more than the exhibition of some
relation in its simplest, most visible and palpable form. The growth of
ideas rests, at bottom, upon similes; because ideas arise by a process
of combining the similarities and neglecting the differences between
things. Further, intelligence, in the strict sense of the word,
ultimately consists in a seizing of relations; and a clear and pure
grasp of relations is all the more often attained when the comparison
is made between cases that lie wide apart from one another, and between
things of quite different nature. As long as a relation is known to me
as existing only in a single case, I have but an _individual_ idea of
it--in other words, only an intuitive knowledge of it; but as soon as I
see the same relation in two different cases, I have a _general_ idea
of its whole nature, and this is a deeper and more perfect knowledge.

Since,
then, similes and metaphors are such a powerful engine of knowledge, it
is a sign of great intelligence in a writer if his similes are unusual
and, at the same time, to the point. Aristotle also observes that by
far the most important thing to a writer is to have this power of
metaphor; for it is a gift which cannot be acquired, and it is a mark
of genius.

As regards _reading_, to require that a man shall
retain everything he has ever read, is like asking him to carry about
with him all he has ever eaten. The one kind of food has given him
bodily, and the other mental, nourishment; and it is through these two
means that he has grown to be what he is. The body assimilates only
that which is like it; and so a man retains in his mind only that which
interests him, in other words, that which suits his system of thought
or his purposes in life.

If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad
ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.

_Repetitio
est mater studiorum_. Any book that is at all important ought to be at
once read through twice; partly because, on a second reading, the
connection of the different portions of the book will be better
understood, and the beginning comprehended only when the end is known;
and partly because we are not in the same temper and disposition on
both readings. On the second perusal we get a new view of every passage
and a different impression of the whole book, which then appears in
another light.

A man's works are the quintessence of his mind,
and even though he may possess very great capacity, they will always be
incomparably more valuable than his conversation. Nay, in all essential
matters his works will not only make up for the lack of personal
intercourse with him, but they will far surpass it in solid advantages.
The writings even of a man of moderate genius may be edifying, worth
reading and instructive, because they are his quintessence--the result
and fruit of all his thought and study; whilst conversation with him
may be unsatisfactory.

So it is that we can read books by men in
whose company we find nothing to please, and that a high degree of
culture leads us to seek entertainment almost wholly from books and not
from men.

ON CRITICISM.

The following brief remarks on
the critical faculty are chiefly intended to show that, for the most
part, there is no such thing. It is a _rara avis_; almost as rare,
indeed, as the phoenix, which appears only once in five hundred years.

When
we speak of _taste_--an expression not chosen with any regard for
it--we mean the discovery, or, it may be only the recognition, of what
is _right aesthetically_, apart from the guidance of any rule; and
this, either because no rule has as yet been extended to the matter in
question, or else because, if existing, it is unknown to the artist, or
the critic, as the case may be. Instead of _taste_, we might use the
expression _aesthetic sense_, if this were not tautological.

The
perceptive critical taste is, so to speak, the female analogue to the
male quality of productive talent or genius. Not capable of _begetting_
great work itself, it consists in a capacity of _reception_, that is to
say, of recognizing as such what is right, fit, beautiful, or the
reverse; in other words, of discriminating the good from the bad, of
discovering and appreciating the one and condemning the other.

In
appreciating a genius, criticism should not deal with the errors in his
productions or with the poorer of his works, and then proceed to rate
him low; it should attend only to the qualities in which he most
excels. For in the sphere of intellect, as in other spheres, weakness
and perversity cleave so firmly to human nature that even the most
brilliant mind is not wholly and at all times free from them. Hence the
great errors to be found even in the works of the greatest men; or as
Horace puts it, _quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus_.

That which
distinguishes genius, and should be the standard for judging it, is the
height to which it is able to soar when it is in the proper mood and
finds a fitting occasion--a height always out of the reach of ordinary
talent. And, in like manner, it is a very dangerous thing to compare
two great men of the same class; for instance, two great poets, or
musicians, or philosophers, or artists; because injustice to the one or
the other, at least for the moment, can hardly be avoided. For in
making a comparison of the kind the critic looks to some particular
merit of the one and at once discovers that it is absent in the other,
who is thereby disparaged. And then if the process is reversed, and the
critic begins with the latter and discovers his peculiar merit, which
is quite of a different order from that presented by the former, with
whom it may be looked for in vain, the result is that both of them
suffer undue depreciation.

There are critics who severally think
that it rests with each one of them what shall be accounted good, and
what bad. They all mistake their own toy-trumpets for the trombones of
fame.

A drug does not effect its purpose if the dose is too
large; and it is the same with censure and adverse criticism when it
exceeds the measure of justice.

The disastrous thing for
intellectual merit is that it must wait for those to praise the good
who have themselves produced nothing but what is bad; nay, it is a
primary misfortune that it has to receive its crown at the hands of the
critical power of mankind--a quality of which most men possess only the
weak and impotent semblance, so that the reality may be numbered
amongst the rarest gifts of nature. Hence La Bruy�re's remark is,
unhappily, as true as it is neat. _Apr�s l'esprit de discernement_, he
says, _ce qu'il y a au monde de plus rare, ce sont les diamans et les
perles_. The spirit of discernment! the critical faculty! it is these
that are lacking. Men do not know how to distinguish the genuine from
the false, the corn from the chaff, gold from copper; or to perceive
the wide gulf that separates a genius from an ordinary man. Thus we
have that bad state of things described in an old-fashioned verse,
which gives it as the lot of the great ones here on earth to be
recognized only when they are gone:

When
any genuine and excellent work makes its appearance, the chief
difficulty in its way is the amount of bad work it finds already in
possession of the field, and accepted as though it were good. And then
if, after a long time, the new comer really succeeds, by a hard
struggle, in vindicating his place for himself and winning reputation,
he will soon encounter fresh difficulty from some affected, dull,
awkward imitator, whom people drag in, with the object of calmly
setting him up on the altar beside the genius; not seeing the
difference and really thinking that here they have to do with another
great man. This is what Yriarte means by the first lines of his
twenty-eighth Fable, where he declares that the ignorant rabble always
sets equal value on the good and the bad:

So
even Shakespeare's dramas had, immediately after his death, to give
place to those of Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and to
yield the supremacy for a hundred years. So Kant's serious philosophy
was crowded out by the nonsense of Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Hegel.
And even in a sphere accessible to all, we have seen unworthy imitators
quickly diverting public attention from the incomparable Walter Scott.
For, say what you will, the public has no sense for excellence, and
therefore no notion how very rare it is to find men really capable of
doing anything great in poetry, philosophy, or art, or that their works
are alone worthy of exclusive attention. The dabblers, whether in verse
or in any other high sphere, should be every day unsparingly reminded
that neither gods, nor men, nor booksellers have pardoned their
mediocrity:

Are
they not the weeds that prevent the corn coming up, so that they may
cover all the ground themselves? And then there happens that which has
been well and freshly described by the lamented Feuchtersleben,[1] who
died so young: how people cry out in their haste that nothing is being
done, while all the while great work is quietly growing to maturity;
and then, when it appears, it is not seen or heard in the clamor, but
goes its way silently, in modest grief:

[Footnote
1: _Translator's Note_.--Ernst Freiherr von Feuchtersleben (1806-49),
an Austrian physician, philosopher, and poet, and a specialist in
medical psychology. The best known of his songs is that beginning "_Es
ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath_" to which Mendelssohn composed one of his
finest melodies.]

This lamentable death of the critical faculty
is not less obvious in the case of science, as is shown by the
tenacious life of false and disproved theories. If they are once
accepted, they may go on bidding defiance to truth for fifty or even a
hundred years and more, as stable as an iron pier in the midst of the
waves. The Ptolemaic system was still held a century after Copernicus
had promulgated his theory. Bacon, Descartes and Locke made their way
extremely slowly and only after a long time; as the reader may see by
d'Alembert's celebrated Preface to the _Encyclopedia_. Newton was not
more successful; and this is sufficiently proved by the bitterness and
contempt with which Leibnitz attacked his theory of gravitation in the
controversy with Clarke.[1] Although Newton lived for almost forty
years after the appearance of the _Principia_, his teaching was, when
he died, only to some extent accepted in his own country, whilst
outside England he counted scarcely twenty adherents; if we may believe
the introductory note to Voltaire's exposition of his theory. It was,
indeed, chiefly owing to this treatise of Voltaire's that the system
became known in France nearly twenty years after Newton's death. Until
then a firm, resolute, and patriotic stand was made by the Cartesian
_Vortices_; whilst only forty years previously, this same Cartesian
philosophy had been forbidden in the French schools; and now in turn
d'Agnesseau, the Chancellor, refused Voltaire the _Imprimatur_ for his
treatise on the Newtonian doctrine. On the other hand, in our day
Newton's absurd theory of color still completely holds the field, forty
years after the publication of Goethe's. Hume, too, was disregarded up
to his fiftieth year, though he began very early and wrote in a
thoroughly popular style. And Kant, in spite of having written and
talked all his life long, did not become a famous man until he was
sixty.

[Footnote 1: See especially �� 35, 113, 118, 120, 122, 128.]

Artists
and poets have, to be sure, more chance than thinkers, because their
public is at least a hundred times as large. Still, what was thought of
Beethoven and Mozart during their lives? what of Dante? what even of
Shakespeare? If the latter's contemporaries had in any way recognized
his worth, at least one good and accredited portrait of him would have
come down to us from an age when the art of painting flourished;
whereas we possess only some very doubtful pictures, a bad copperplate,
and a still worse bust on his tomb.[1] And in like manner, if he had
been duly honored, specimens of his handwriting would have been
preserved to us by the hundred, instead of being confined, as is the
case, to the signatures to a few legal documents. The Portuguese are
still proud of their only poet Camo�ns. He lived, however, on alms
collected every evening in the street by a black slave whom he had
brought with him from the Indies. In time, no doubt, justice will be
done everyone; _tempo � galant uomo_; but it is as late and slow in
arriving as in a court of law, and the secret condition of it is that
the recipient shall be no longer alive. The precept of Jesus the son of
Sirach is faithfully followed: _Judge none blessed before his
death._[2] He, then, who has produced immortal works, must find comfort
by applying to them the words of the Indian myth, that the minutes of
life amongst the immortals seem like years of earthly existence; and
so, too, that years upon earth are only as the minutes of the immortals.

This
lack of critical insight is also shown by the fact that, while in every
century the excellent work of earlier time is held in honor, that of
its own is misunderstood, and the attention which is its due is given
to bad work, such as every decade carries with it only to be the sport
of the next. That men are slow to recognize genuine merit when it
appears in their own age, also proves that they do not understand or
enjoy or really value the long-acknowledged works of genius, which they
honor only on the score of authority. The crucial test is the fact that
bad work--Fichte's philosophy, for example--if it wins any reputation,
also maintains it for one or two generations; and only when its public
is very large does its fall follow sooner.

Now, just as the sun
cannot shed its light but to the eye that sees it, nor music sound but
to the hearing ear, so the value of all masterly work in art and
science is conditioned by the kinship and capacity of the mind to which
it speaks. It is only such a mind as this that possesses the magic word
to stir and call forth the spirits that lie hidden in great work. To
the ordinary mind a masterpiece is a sealed cabinet of mystery,--an
unfamiliar musical instrument from which the player, however much he
may flatter himself, can draw none but confused tones. How different a
painting looks when seen in a good light, as compared with some dark
corner! Just in the same way, the impression made by a masterpiece
varies with the capacity of the mind to understand it.

A fine
work, then, requires a mind sensitive to its beauty; a thoughtful work,
a mind that can really think, if it is to exist and live at all. But
alas! it may happen only too often that he who gives a fine work to the
world afterwards feels like a maker of fireworks, who displays with
enthusiasm the wonders that have taken him so much time and trouble to
prepare, and then learns that he has come to the wrong place, and that
the fancied spectators were one and all inmates of an asylum for the
blind. Still even that is better than if his public had consisted
entirely of men who made fireworks themselves; as in this case, if his
display had been extraordinarily good, it might possibly have cost him
his head.

The source of all pleasure and delight is the feeling
of kinship. Even with the sense of beauty it is unquestionably our own
species in the animal world, and then again our own race, that appears
to us the fairest. So, too, in intercourse with others, every man shows
a decided preference for those who resemble him; and a blockhead will
find the society of another blockhead incomparably more pleasant than
that of any number of great minds put together. Every man must
necessarily take his chief pleasure in his own work, because it is the
mirror of his own mind, the echo of his own thought; and next in order
will come the work of people like him; that is to say, a dull, shallow
and perverse man, a dealer in mere words, will give his sincere and
hearty applause only to that which is dull, shallow, perverse or merely
verbose. On the other hand, he will allow merit to the work of great
minds only on the score of authority, in other words, because he is
ashamed to speak his opinion; for in reality they give him no pleasure
at all. They do not appeal to him; nay, they repel him; and he will not
confess this even to himself. The works of genius cannot be fully
enjoyed except by those who are themselves of the privileged order. The
first recognition of them, however, when they exist without authority
to support them, demands considerable superiority of mind.

When
the reader takes all this into consideration, he should be surprised,
not that great work is so late in winning reputation, but that it wins
it at all. And as a matter of fact, fame comes only by a slow and
complex process. The stupid person is by degrees forced, and as it
were, tamed, into recognizing the superiority of one who stands
immediately above him; this one in his turn bows before some one else;
and so it goes on until the weight of the votes gradually prevail over
their number; and this is just the condition of all genuine, in other
words, deserved fame. But until then, the greatest genius, even after
he has passed his time of trial, stands like a king amidst a crowd of
his own subjects, who do not know him by sight and therefore will not
do his behests; unless, indeed, his chief ministers of state are in his
train. For no subordinate official can be the direct recipient of the
royal commands, as he knows only the signature of his immediate
superior; and this is repeated all the way up into the highest ranks,
where the under-secretary attests the minister's signature, and the
minister that of the king. There are analogous stages to be passed
before a genius can attain widespread fame. This is why his reputation
most easily comes to a standstill at the very outset; because the
highest authorities, of whom there can be but few, are most frequently
not to be found; but the further down he goes in the scale the more
numerous are those who take the word from above, so that his fame is no
more arrested.

We must console ourselves for this state of
things by reflecting that it is really fortunate that the greater
number of men do not form a judgment on their own responsibility, but
merely take it on authority. For what sort of criticism should we have
on Plato and Kant, Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe, if every man were to
form his opinion by what he really has and enjoys of these writers,
instead of being forced by authority to speak of them in a fit and
proper way, however little he may really feel what he says. Unless
something of this kind took place, it would be impossible for true
merit, in any high sphere, to attain fame at all. At the same time it
is also fortunate that every man has just so much critical power of his
own as is necessary for recognizing the superiority of those who are
placed immediately over him, and for following their lead. This means
that the many come in the end to submit to the authority of the few;
and there results that hierarchy of critical judgments on which is
based the possibility of a steady, and eventually wide-reaching, fame.

The
lowest class in the community is quite impervious to the merits of a
great genius; and for these people there is nothing left but the
monument raised to him, which, by the impression it produces on their
senses, awakes in them a dim idea of the man's greatness.

Literary
journals should be a dam against the unconscionable scribbling of the
age, and the ever-increasing deluge of bad and useless books. Their
judgments should be uncorrupted, just and rigorous; and every piece of
bad work done by an incapable person; every device by which the empty
head tries to come to the assistance of the empty purse, that is to
say, about nine-tenths of all existing books, should be mercilessly
scourged. Literary journals would then perform their duty, which is to
keep down the craving for writing and put a check upon the deception of
the public, instead of furthering these evils by a miserable
toleration, which plays into the hands of author and publisher, and
robs the reader of his time and his money.

If there were such a
paper as I mean, every bad writer, every brainless compiler, every
plagiarist from other's books, every hollow and incapable place-hunter,
every sham-philosopher, every vain and languishing poetaster, would
shudder at the prospect of the pillory in which his bad work would
inevitably have to stand soon after publication. This would paralyze
his twitching fingers, to the true welfare of literature, in which what
is bad is not only useless but positively pernicious. Now, most books
are bad and ought to have remained unwritten. Consequently praise
should be as rare as is now the case with blame, which is withheld
under the influence of personal considerations, coupled with the maxim
_accedas socius, laudes lauderis ut absens_.

It is quite wrong
to try to introduce into literature the same toleration as must
necessarily prevail in society towards those stupid, brainless people
who everywhere swarm in it. In literature such people are impudent
intruders; and to disparage the bad is here duty towards the good; for
he who thinks nothing bad will think nothing good either. Politeness,
which has its source in social relations, is in literature an alien,
and often injurious, element; because it exacts that bad work shall be
called good. In this way the very aim of science and art is directly
frustrated.

The ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only
by people who joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and
still rarer power of judgment; so that perhaps there could, at the very
most, be one, and even hardly one, in the whole country; but there it
would stand, like a just Aeropagus, every member of which would have to
be elected by all the others. Under the system that prevails at
present, literary journals are carried on by a clique, and secretly
perhaps also by booksellers for the good of the trade; and they are
often nothing but coalitions of bad heads to prevent the good ones
succeeding. As Goethe once remarked to me, nowhere is there so much
dishonesty as in literature.

But, above all, anonymity, that
shield of all literary rascality, would have to disappear. It was
introduced under the pretext of protecting the honest critic, who
warned the public, against the resentment of the author and his
friends. But where there is one case of this sort, there will be a
hundred where it merely serves to take all responsibility from the man
who cannot stand by what he has said, or possibly to conceal the shame
of one who has been cowardly and base enough to recommend a book to the
public for the purpose of putting money into his own pocket. Often
enough it is only a cloak for covering the obscurity, incompetence and
insignificance of the critic. It is incredible what impudence these
fellows will show, and what literary trickery they will venture to
commit, as soon as they know they are safe under the shadow of
anonymity. Let me recommend a general _Anti-criticism_, a universal
medicine or panacea, to put a stop to all anonymous reviewing, whether
it praises the bad or blames the good: _Rascal! your name_! For a man
to wrap himself up and draw his hat over his face, and then fall upon
people who are walking about without any disguise--this is not the part
of a gentleman, it is the part of a scoundrel and a knave.

An
anonymous review has no more authority than an anonymous letter; and
one should be received with the same mistrust as the other. Or shall we
take the name of the man who consents to preside over what is, in the
strict sense of the word, _une soci�t� anonyme_ as a guarantee for the
veracity of his colleagues?

Even Rousseau, in the preface to the
_Nouvelle Helo�se_, declares _tout honn�te homme doit avouer les livres
qu'il public_; which in plain language means that every honorable man
ought to sign his articles, and that no one is honorable who does not
do so. How much truer this is of polemical writing, which is the
general character of reviews! Riemer was quite right in the opinion he
gives in his _Reminiscences of Goethe:[1] An overt enemy_, he says, _an
enemy who meets you face to face, is an honorable man, who will treat
you fairly, and with whom you can come to terms and be reconciled: but
an enemy who conceals himself_ is a base, cowardly scoundrel, _who has
not courage enough to avow his own judgment; it is not his opinion that
he cares about, but only the secret pleasures of wreaking his anger
without being found out or punished._ This will also have been Goethe's
opinion, as he was generally the source from which Riemer drew his
observations. And, indeed, Rousseau's maxim applies to every line that
is printed. Would a man in a mask ever be allowed to harangue a mob, or
speak in any assembly; and that, too, when he was going to attack
others and overwhelm them with abuse?

[Footnote 1: Preface, p. xxix.]

Anonymity
is the refuge for all literary and journalistic rascality. It is a
practice which must be completely stopped. Every article, even in a
newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author; and the
editor should be made strictly responsible for the accuracy of the
signature. The freedom of the press should be thus far restricted; so
that when a man publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of
the newspaper, he should be answerable for it, at any rate with his
honor, if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralize the
effect of his words. And since even the most insignificant person is
known in his own circle, the result of such a measure would be to put
an end to two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to restrain the
audacity of many a poisonous tongue.

ON REPUTATION.

Writers
may be classified as meteors, planets and fixed stars. A meteor makes a
striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry _There!_ and it is
gone for ever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time.
They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded with them by the
inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long
before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is
reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their
own orbit--their contemporaries. Their path is one of change and
movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed
stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the
firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect
to-day is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax,
their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint.
They belong not to _one_ system, _one_ nation only, but to the
universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually
many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this
earth.

We have seen in the previous chapter that where a man's
merits are of a high order, it is difficult for him to win reputation,
because the public is uncritical and lacks discernment. But another and
no less serious hindrance to fame comes from the envy it has to
encounter. For even in the lowest kinds of work, envy balks even the
beginnings of a reputation, and never ceases to cleave to it up to the
last. How great a part is played by envy in the wicked ways of the
world! Ariosto is right in saying that the dark side of our mortal life
predominates, so full it is of this evil:

For
envy is the moving spirit of that secret and informal, though
flourishing, alliance everywhere made by mediocrity against individual
eminence, no matter of what kind. In his own sphere of work no one will
allow another to be distinguished: he is an intruder who cannot be
tolerated. _Si quelq'un excelle parmi nous, qu'il aille exceller
ailleurs_! this is the universal password of the second-rate. In
addition, then, to the rarity of true merit and the difficulty it has
in being understood and recognized, there is the envy of thousands to
be reckoned with, all of them bent on suppressing, nay, on smothering
it altogether. No one is taken for what he is, but for what others make
of him; and this is the handle used by mediocrity to keep down
distinction, by not letting it come up as long as that can possibly be
prevented.

There are two ways of behaving in regard to merit:
either to have some of one's own, or to refuse any to others. The
latter method is more convenient, and so it is generally adopted. As
envy is a mere sign of deficiency, so to envy merit argues the lack of
it. My excellent Balthazar Gracian has given a very fine account of
this relation between envy and merit in a lengthy fable, which may be
found in his _Discreto_ under the heading _Hombre de ostentacion_. He
describes all the birds as meeting together and conspiring against the
peacock, because of his magnificent feathers. _If_, said the magpie,
_we could only manage to put a stop to the cursed parading of his tail,
there would soon be an end of his beauty; for what is not seen is as
good as what does not exist_.

This explains how modesty came to
be a virtue. It was invented only as a protection against envy. That
there have always been rascals to urge this virtue, and to rejoice
heartily over the bashfulness of a man of merit, has been shown at
length in my chief work.[1] In Lichtenberg's _Miscellaneous Writings_ I
find this sentence quoted: _Modesty should be the virtue of those who
possess no other_. Goethe has a well-known saying, which offends many
people: _It is only knaves who are modest_!--_Nur die Lumpen sind
bescheiden_! but it has its prototype in Cervantes, who includes in his
_Journey up Parnassus_ certain rules of conduct for poets, and amongst
them the following: _Everyone whose verse shows him to be a poet should
have a high opinion of himself, relying on the proverb that he is a
knave who thinks himself one_. And Shakespeare, in many of his Sonnets,
which gave him the only opportunity he had of speaking of himself,
declares, with a confidence equal to his ingenuousness, that what he
writes is immortal.[2]

[Footnote 1: _Welt als Wille_, Vol. II. c. 37.]

[Footnote
2: Collier, one of his critical editors, in his Introduction to the
Sonettes, remarks upon this point: "In many of them are to be found
most remarkable indications of self-confidence and of assurance in the
immortality of his verses, and in this respect the author's opinion was
constant and uniform. He never scruples to express it,... and perhaps
there is no writer of ancient or modern times who, for the quantity of
such writings left behind him, has so frequently or so strongly
declared that what he had produced in this department of poetry 'the
world would not willingly let die.'"]

A method of underrating
good work often used by envy--in reality, however, only the obverse
side of it--consists in the dishonorable and unscrupulous laudation of
the bad; for no sooner does bad work gain currency than it draws
attention from the good. But however effective this method may be for a
while, especially if it is applied on a large scale, the day of
reckoning comes at last, and the fleeting credit given to bad work is
paid off by the lasting discredit which overtakes those who abjectly
praised it. Hence these critics prefer to remain anonymous.

A
like fate threatens, though more remotely, those who depreciate and
censure good work; and consequently many are too prudent to attempt it.
But there is another way; and when a man of eminent merit appears, the
first effect he produces is often only to pique all his rivals, just as
the peacock's tail offended the birds. This reduces them to a deep
silence; and their silence is so unanimous that it savors of
preconcertion. Their tongues are all paralyzed. It is the _silentium
livoris_ described by Seneca. This malicious silence, which is
technically known as _ignoring_, may for a long time interfere with the
growth of reputation; if, as happens in the higher walks of learning,
where a man's immediate audience is wholly composed of rival workers
and professed students, who then form the channel of his fame, the
greater public is obliged to use its suffrage without being able to
examine the matter for itself. And if, in the end, that malicious
silence is broken in upon by the voice of praise, it will be but seldom
that this happens entirely apart from some ulterior aim, pursued by
those who thus manipulate justice. For, as Goethe says in the
_West-�stlicher Divan_, a man can get no recognition, either from many
persons or from only one, unless it is to publish abroad the critic's
own discernment:

The
credit you allow to another man engaged in work similar to your own or
akin to it, must at bottom be withdrawn from yourself; and you can
praise him only at the expense of your own claims.

Accordingly,
mankind is in itself not at all inclined to award praise and
reputation; it is more disposed to blame and find fault, whereby it
indirectly praises itself. If, notwithstanding this, praise is won from
mankind, some extraneous motive must prevail. I am not here referring
to the disgraceful way in which mutual friends will puff one another
into a reputation; outside of that, an effectual motive is supplied by
the feeling that next to the merit of doing something oneself, comes
that of correctly appreciating and recognizing what others have done.
This accords with the threefold division of heads drawn up by Hesiod[1]
and afterwards by Machiavelli[2] _There are_, says the latter, _in the
capacities of mankind, three varieties: one man will understand a thing
by himself; another so far as it is explained to him; a third, neither
of himself nor when it is put clearly before him_. He, then, who
abandons hope of making good his claims to the first class, will be
glad to seize the opportunity of taking a place in the second. It is
almost wholly owing to this state of things that merit may always rest
assured of ultimately meeting with recognition.

[Footnote 1: _Works and Days_, 293.]

[Footnote 2: _The Prince_, ch. 22.]

To
this also is due the fact that when the value of a work has once been
recognized and may no longer be concealed or denied, all men vie in
praising and honoring it; simply because they are conscious of thereby
doing themselves an honor. They act in the spirit of Xenophon's remark:
_he must be a wise man who knows what is wise_. So when they see that
the prize of original merit is for ever out of their reach, they hasten
to possess themselves of that which comes second best--the correct
appreciation of it. Here it happens as with an army which has been
forced to yield; when, just as previously every man wanted to be
foremost in the fight, so now every man tries to be foremost in running
away. They all hurry forward to offer their applause to one who is now
recognized to be worthy of praise, in virtue of a recognition, as a
rule unconscious, of that law of homogeneity which I mentioned in the
last chapter; so that it may seem as though their way of thinking and
looking at things were homogeneous with that of the celebrated man, and
that they may at least save the honor of their literary taste, since
nothing else is left them.

From this it is plain that, whereas
it is very difficult to win fame, it is not hard to keep it when once
attained; and also that a reputation which comes quickly does not last
very long; for here too, _quod cito fit, cito perit_. It is obvious
that if the ordinary average man can easily recognize, and the rival
workers willingly acknowledge, the value of any performance, it will
not stand very much above the capacity of either of them to achieve it
for themselves. _Tantum quisque laudat, quantum se posse sperat
imitari_--a man will praise a thing only so far as he hopes to be able
to imitate it himself. Further, it is a suspicious sign if a reputation
comes quickly; for an application of the laws of homogeneity will show
that such a reputation is nothing but the direct applause of the
multitude. What this means may be seen by a remark once made by
Phocion, when he was interrupted in a speech by the loud cheers of the
mob. Turning to his friends who were standing close by, he asked: _Have
I made a mistake and said something stupid?_[1]

[Footnote 1: Plutarch, _Apophthegms_.]

Contrarily,
a reputation that is to last a long time must be slow in maturing, and
the centuries of its duration have generally to be bought at the cost
of contemporary praise. For that which is to keep its position so long,
must be of a perfection difficult to attain; and even to recognize this
perfection requires men who are not always to be found, and never in
numbers sufficiently great to make themselves heard; whereas envy is
always on the watch and doing its best to smother their voice. But with
moderate talent, which soon meets with recognition, there is the danger
that those who possess it will outlive both it and themselves; so that
a youth of fame may be followed by an old age of obscurity. In the case
of great merit, on the other hand, a man may remain unknown for many
years, but make up for it later on by attaining a brilliant reputation.
And if it should be that this comes only after he is no more, well! he
is to be reckoned amongst those of whom Jean Paul says that extreme
unction is their baptism. He may console himself by thinking of the
Saints, who also are canonized only after they are dead.

Thus
what Mahlmann[1] has said so well in _Herodes_ holds good; in this
world truly great work never pleases at once, and the god set up by the
multitude keeps his place on the altar but a short time:

It is worth mention that this rule is
most directly confirmed in the case of pictures, where, as connoisseurs
well know, the greatest masterpieces are not the first to attract
attention. If they make a deep impression, it is not after one, but
only after repeated, inspection; but then they excite more and more
admiration every time they are seen.

Moreover, the chances that
any given work will be quickly and rightly appreciated, depend upon two
conditions: firstly, the character of the work, whether high or low, in
other words, easy or difficult to understand; and, secondly, the kind
of public it attracts, whether large or small. This latter condition
is, no doubt, in most instances a, corollary of the former; but it also
partly depends upon whether the work in question admits, like books and
musical compositions, of being produced in great numbers. By the
compound action of these two conditions, achievements which serve no
materially useful end--and these alone are under consideration
here--will vary in regard to the chances they have of meeting with
timely recognition and due appreciation; and the order of precedence,
beginning with those who have the greatest chance, will be somewhat as
follows: acrobats, circus riders, ballet-dancers, jugglers, actors,
singers, musicians, composers, poets (both the last on account of the
multiplication of their works), architects, painters, sculptors,
philosophers.

The last place of all is unquestionably taken by
philosophers because their works are meant not for entertainment, but
for instruction, and because they presume some knowledge on the part of
the reader, and require him to make an effort of his own to understand
them. This makes their public extremely small, and causes their fame to
be more remarkable for its length than for its breadth. And, in
general, it may be said that the possibility of a man's fame lasting a
long time, stands in almost inverse ratio with the chance that it will
be early in making its appearance; so that, as regards length of fame,
the above order of precedence may be reversed. But, then, the poet and
the composer will come in the end to stand on the same level as the
philosopher; since, when once a work is committed to writing, it is
possible to preserve it to all time. However, the first place still
belongs by right to the philosopher, because of the much greater
scarcity of good work in this sphere, and the high importance of it;
and also because of the possibility it offers of an almost perfect
translation into any language. Sometimes, indeed, it happens that a
philosopher's fame outlives even his works themselves; as has happened
with Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Democritus, Parmenides, Epicurus
and many others.

My remarks are, as I have said, confined to
achievements that are not of any material use. Work that serves some
practical end, or ministers directly to some pleasure of the senses,
will never have any difficulty in being duly appreciated. No first-rate
pastry-cook could long remain obscure in any town, to say nothing of
having to appeal to posterity.

Under fame of rapid growth is
also to be reckoned fame of a false and artificial kind; where, for
instance, a book is worked into a reputation by means of unjust praise,
the help of friends, corrupt criticism, prompting from above and
collusion from below. All this tells upon the multitude, which is
rightly presumed to have no power of judging for itself. This sort of
fame is like a swimming bladder, by its aid a heavy body may keep
afloat. It bears up for a certain time, long or short according as the
bladder is well sewed up and blown; but still the air comes out
gradually, and the body sinks. This is the inevitable fate of all works
which are famous by reason of something outside of themselves. False
praise dies away; collusion comes to an end; critics declare the
reputation ungrounded; it vanishes, and is replaced by so much the
greater contempt. Contrarily, a genuine work, which, having the source
of its fame in itself, can kindle admiration afresh in every age,
resembles a body of low specific gravity, which always keeps up of its
own accord, and so goes floating down the stream of time.

Men of
great genius, whether their work be in poetry, philosophy or art, stand
in all ages like isolated heroes, keeping up single-handed a desperate
struggling against the onslaught of an army of opponents.[1] Is not
this characteristic of the miserable nature of mankind? The dullness,
grossness, perversity, silliness and brutality of by far the greater
part of the race, are always an obstacle to the efforts of the genius,
whatever be the method of his art; they so form that hostile army to
which at last he has to succumb. Let the isolated champion achieve what
he may: it is slow to be acknowledged; it is late in being appreciated,
and then only on the score of authority; it may easily fall into
neglect again, at any rate for a while. Ever afresh it finds itself
opposed by false, shallow, and insipid ideas, which are better suited
to that large majority, that so generally hold the field. Though the
critic may step forth and say, like Hamlet when he held up the two
portraits to his wretched mother, _Have you eyes? Have you eyes_? alas!
they have none. When I watch the behavior of a crowd of people in the
presence of some great master's work, and mark the manner of their
applause, they often remind me of trained monkeys in a show. The
monkey's gestures are, no doubt, much like those of men; but now and
again they betray that the real inward spirit of these gestures is not
in them. Their irrational nature peeps out.

[Footnote 1:
_Translator's Note_.--At this point Schopenhauer interrupts the thread
of his discourse to speak at length upon an example of false fame.
Those who are at all acquainted with the philosopher's views will not
be surprised to find that the writer thus held up to scorn is Hegel;
and readers of the other volumes in this series will, with the
translator, have had by now quite enough of the subject. The passage is
therefore omitted.]

It is often said of a man that _he is in
advance of his age_; and it follows from the above remarks that this
must be taken to mean that he is in advance of humanity in general.
Just because of this fact, a genius makes no direct appeal except to
those who are too rare to allow of their ever forming a numerous body
at any one period. If he is in this respect not particularly favored by
fortune, he will be _misunderstood by his own age_; in other words, he
will remain unaccepted until time gradually brings together the voices
of those few persons who are capable of judging a work of such high
character. Then posterity will say: _This man was in advance of his
age_, instead of _in advance of humanity_; because humanity will be
glad to lay the burden of its own faults upon a single epoch.

Hence,
if a man has been superior to his own age, he would also have been
superior to any other; provided that, in that age, by some rare and
happy chance, a few just men, capable of judging in the sphere of his
achievements, had been born at the same time with him; just as when,
according to a beautiful Indian myth, Vischnu becomes incarnate as a
hero, so, too, Brahma at the same time appears as the singer of his
deeds; and hence Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa are incarnations of Brahma.

In
this sense, then, it may be said that every immortal work puts its age
to the proof, whether or no it will be able to recognize the merit of
it. As a rule, the men of any age stand such a test no better than the
neighbors of Philemon and Baucis, who expelled the deities they failed
to recognize. Accordingly, the right standard for judging the
intellectual worth of any generation is supplied, not by the great
minds that make their appearance in it--for their capacities are the
work of Nature, and the possibility of cultivating them a matter of
chance circumstance--but by the way in which contemporaries receive
their works; whether, I mean, they give their applause soon and with a
will, or late and in niggardly fashion, or leave it to be bestowed
altogether by posterity.

This last fate will be especially
reserved for works of a high character. For the happy chance mentioned
above will be all the more certain not to come, in proportion as there
are few to appreciate the kind of work done by great minds. Herein lies
the immeasurable advantage possessed by poets in respect of reputation;
because their work is accessible to almost everyone. If it had been
possible for Sir Walter Scott to be read and criticised by only some
hundred persons, perhaps in his life-time any common scribbler would
have been preferred to him; and afterwards, when he had taken his
proper place, it would also have been said in his honor that he was _in
advance of his age_. But if envy, dishonesty and the pursuit of
personal aims are added to the incapacity of those hundred persons who,
in the name of their generation, are called upon to pass judgment on a
work, then indeed it meets with the same sad fate as attends a suitor
who pleads before a tribunal of judges one and all corrupt.

In
corroboration of this, we find that the history of literature generally
shows all those who made knowledge and insight their goal to have
remained unrecognized and neglected, whilst those who paraded with the
vain show of it received the admiration of their contemporaries,
together with the emoluments.

The effectiveness of an author
turns chiefly upon his getting the reputation that he should be read.
But by practicing various arts, by the operation of chance, and by
certain natural affinities, this reputation is quickly won by a hundred
worthless people: while a worthy writer may come by it very slowly and
tardily. The former possess friends to help them; for the rabble is
always a numerous body which holds well together. The latter has
nothing but enemies; because intellectual superiority is everywhere and
under all circumstances the most hateful thing in the world, and
especially to bunglers in the same line of work, who want to pass for
something themselves.[1]

[Footnote 1: If the professors of
philosophy should chance to think that I am here hinting at them and
the tactics they have for more than thirty years pursued toward my
works, they have hit the nail upon the head.]

This being so, it
is a prime condition for doing any great work--any work which is to
outlive its own age, that a man pay no heed to his contemporaries,
their views and opinions, and the praise or blame which they bestow.
This condition is, however, fulfilled of itself when a man really does
anything great, and it is fortunate that it is so. For if, in producing
such a work, he were to look to the general opinion or the judgment of
his colleagues, they would lead him astray at every step. Hence, if a
man wants to go down to posterity, he must withdraw from the influence
of his own age. This will, of course, generally mean that he must also
renounce any influence upon it, and be ready to buy centuries of fame
by foregoing the applause of his contemporaries.

For when any
new and wide-reaching truth comes into the world--and if it is new, it
must be paradoxical--an obstinate stand will be made against it as long
as possible; nay, people will continue to deny it even after they
slacken their opposition and are almost convinced of its truth.
Meanwhile it goes on quietly working its way, and, like an acid,
undermining everything around it. From time to time a crash is heard;
the old error comes tottering to the ground, and suddenly the new
fabric of thought stands revealed, as though it were a monument just
uncovered. Everyone recognizes and admires it. To be sure, this all
comes to pass for the most part very slowly. As a rule, people discover
a man to be worth listening to only after he is gone; their _hear,
hear_, resounds when the orator has left the platform.

Works of
the ordinary type meet with a better fate. Arising as they do in the
course of, and in connection with, the general advance in contemporary
culture, they are in close alliance with the spirit of their age--in
other words, just those opinions which happen to be prevalent at the
time. They aim at suiting the needs of the moment. If they have any
merit, it is soon recognized; and they gain currency as books which
reflect the latest ideas. Justice, nay, more than justice, is done to
them. They afford little scope for envy; since, as was said above, a
man will praise a thing only so far as he hopes to be able to imitate
it himself.

But those rare works which are destined to become
the property of all mankind and to live for centuries, are, at their
origin, too far in advance of the point at which culture happens to
stand, and on that very account foreign to it and the spirit of their
own time. They neither belong to it nor are they in any connection with
it, and hence they excite no interest in those who are dominated by it.
They belong to another, a higher stage of culture, and a time that is
still far off. Their course is related to that of ordinary works as the
orbit of Uranus to the orbit of Mercury. For the moment they get no
justice done to them. People are at a loss how to treat them; so they
leave them alone, and go their own snail's pace for themselves. Does
the worm see the eagle as it soars aloft?

Of the number of books
written in any language about one in 100,000 forms a part of its real
and permanent literature. What a fate this one book has to endure
before it outstrips those 100,000 and gains its due place of honor!
Such a book is the work of an extraordinary and eminent mind, and
therefore it is specifically different from the others; a fact which
sooner or later becomes manifest.

Let no one fancy that things
will ever improve in this respect. No! the miserable constitution of
humanity never changes, though it may, to be sure, take somewhat
varying forms with every generation. A distinguished mind seldom has
its full effect in the life-time of its possessor; because, at bottom,
it is completely and properly understood only by minds already akin to
it.

As it is a rare thing for even one man out of many millions
to tread the path that leads to immortality, he must of necessity be
very lonely. The journey to posterity lies through a horribly dreary
region, like the Lybian desert, of which, as is well known, no one has
any idea who has not seen it for himself. Meanwhile let me before all
things recommend the traveler to take light baggage with him; otherwise
he will have to throw away too much on the road. Let him never forget
the words of Balthazar Gracian: _lo bueno si breve, dos vezes
bueno_--good work is doubly good if it is short. This advice is
specially applicable to my own countrymen.

Compared with the
short span of time they live, men of great intellect are like huge
buildings, standing on a small plot of ground. The size of the building
cannot be seen by anyone, just in front of it; nor, for an analogous
reason, can the greatness of a genius be estimated while he lives. But
when a century has passed, the world recognizes it and wishes him back
again.

If the perishable son of time has produced an
imperishable work, how short his own life seems compared with that of
his child! He is like Semela or Maia--a mortal mother who gave birth to
an immortal son; or, contrarily, he is like Achilles in regard to
Thetis. What a contrast there is between what is fleeting and what is
permanent! The short span of a man's life, his necessitous, afflicted,
unstable existence, will seldom allow of his seeing even the beginning
of his immortal child's brilliant career; nor will the father himself
be taken for that which he really is. It may be said, indeed, that a
man whose fame comes after him is the reverse of a nobleman, who is
preceded by it.

However, the only difference that it ultimately
makes to a man to receive his fame at the hands of contemporaries
rather than from posterity is that, in the former case, his admirers
are separated from him by space, and in the latter by time. For even in
the case of contemporary fame, a man does not, as a rule, see his
admirers actually before him. Reverence cannot endure close proximity;
it almost always dwells at some distance from its object; and in the
presence of the person revered it melts like butter in the sun.
Accordingly, if a man is celebrated with his contemporaries,
nine-tenths of those amongst whom he lives will let their esteem be
guided by his rank and fortune; and the remaining tenth may perhaps
have a dull consciousness of his high qualities, because they have
heard about him from remote quarters. There is a fine Latin letter of
Petrarch's on this incompatibility between reverence and the presence
of the person, and between fame and life. It comes second in his
_Epistolae familiares?_[1] and it is addressed to Thomas Messanensis.
He there observes, amongst other things, that the learned men of his
age all made it a rule to think little of a man's writings if they had
even once seen him.

[Footnote 1: In the Venetian edition of 1492.]

Since
distance, then, is essential if a famous man is to be recognized and
revered, it does not matter whether it is distance of space or of time.
It is true that he may sometimes hear of his fame in the one case, but
never in the other; but still, genuine and great merit may make up for
this by confidently anticipating its posthumous fame. Nay, he who
produces some really great thought is conscious of his connection with
coming generations at the very moment he conceives it; so that he feels
the extension of his existence through centuries and thus lives _with_
posterity as well as _for_ it. And when, after enjoying a great man's
work, we are seized with admiration for him, and wish him back, so that
we might see and speak with him, and have him in our possession, this
desire of ours is not unrequited; for he, too, has had his longing for
that posterity which will grant the recognition, honor, gratitude and
love denied by envious contemporaries.

If intellectual works of
the highest order are not allowed their due until they come before the
tribunal of posterity, a contrary fate is prepared for certain
brilliant errors which proceed from men of talent, and appear with an
air of being well grounded. These errors are defended with so much
acumen and learning that they actually become famous with their own
age, and maintain their position at least during their author's
lifetime. Of this sort are many false theories and wrong criticisms;
also poems and works of art, which exhibit some false taste or
mannerism favored by contemporary prejudice. They gain reputation and
currency simply because no one is yet forthcoming who knows how to
refute them or otherwise prove their falsity; and when he appears, as
he usually does, in the next generation, the glory of these works is
brought to an end. Posthumous judges, be their decision favorable to
the appellant or not, form the proper court for quashing the verdict of
contemporaries. That is why it is so difficult and so rare to be
victorious alike in both tribunals.

The unfailing tendency of
time to correct knowledge and judgment should always be kept in view as
a means of allaying anxiety, whenever any grievous error appears,
whether in art, or science, or practical life, and gains ground; or
when some false and thoroughly perverse policy of movement is
undertaken and receives applause at the hands of men. No one should be
angry, or, still less, despondent; but simply imagine that the world
has already abandoned the error in question, and now only requires time
and experience to recognize of its own accord that which a clear vision
detected at the first glance.

When the facts themselves are
eloquent of a truth, there is no need to rush to its aid with words:
for time will give it a thousand tongues. How long it may be before
they speak, will of course depend upon the difficulty of the subject
and the plausibility of the error; but come they will, and often it
would be of no avail to try to anticipate them. In the worst cases it
will happen with theories as it happens with affairs in practical life;
where sham and deception, emboldened by success, advance to greater and
greater lengths, until discovery is made almost inevitable. It is just
so with theories; through the blind confidence of the blockheads who
broach them, their absurdity reaches such a pitch that at last it is
obvious even to the dullest eye. We may thus say to such people: _the
wilder your statements, the better_.

There is also some comfort
to be found in reflecting upon all the whims and crotchets which had
their day and have now utterly vanished. In style, in grammar, in
spelling, there are false notions of this sort which last only three or
four years. But when the errors are on a large scale, while we lament
the brevity of human life, we shall in any case, do well to lag behind
our own age when we see it on a downward path. For there are two ways
of not keeping on a level with the times. A man may be below it; or he
may be above it.

ON GENIUS.

No difference of rank,
position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the
countless millions who use their head only in the service of their
belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and
those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! it is
too good for that; my head shall be active only in its own service; it
shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this
world, and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as
literature, that may answer to my character as an individual. These are
the truly noble, the real _noblesse_ of the world. The others are serfs
and go with the soil--_glebae adscripti_. Of course, I am here
referring to those who have not only the courage, but also the call,
and therefore the right, to order the head to quit the service of the
will; with a result that proves the sacrifice to have been worth the
making. In the case of those to whom all this can only partially apply,
the gulf is not so wide; but even though their talent be small, so long
as it is real, there will always be a sharp line of demarcation between
them and the millions.[1]

[Footnote 1: The correct scale for
adjusting the hierarchy of intelligences is furnished by the degree in
which the mind takes merely individual or approaches universal views of
things. The brute recognizes only the individual as such: its
comprehension does not extend beyond the limits of the individual. But
man reduces the individual to the general; herein lies the exercise of
his reason; and the higher his intelligence reaches, the nearer do his
general ideas approach the point at which they become universal.]

The works of fine art, poetry and philosophy produced by a nation are
the outcome of the superfluous intellect existing in it.

For
him who can understand aright--_cum grano salis_--the relation between
the genius and the normal man may, perhaps, be best expressed as
follows: A genius has a double intellect, one for himself and the
service of his will; the other for the world, of which he becomes the
mirror, in virtue of his purely objective attitude towards it. The work
of art or poetry or philosophy produced by the genius is simply the
result, or quintessence, of this contemplative attitude, elaborated
according to certain technical rules.

The normal man, on the
other hand, has only a single intellect, which may be called
_subjective_ by contrast with the _objective_ intellect of genius.
However acute this subjective intellect may be--and it exists in very
various degrees of perfection--it is never on the same level with the
double intellect of genius; just as the open chest notes of the human
voice, however high, are essentially different from the falsetto notes.
These, like the two upper octaves of the flute and the harmonics of the
violin, are produced by the column of air dividing itself into two
vibrating halves, with a node between them; while the open chest notes
of the human voice and the lower octave of the flute are produced by
the undivided column of air vibrating as a whole. This illustration may
help the reader to understand that specific peculiarity of genius which
is unmistakably stamped on the works, and even on the physiognomy, of
him who is gifted with it. At the same time it is obvious that a double
intellect like this must, as a rule, obstruct the service of the will;
and this explains the poor capacity often shown by genius in the
conduct of life. And what specially characterizes genius is that it has
none of that sobriety of temper which is always to be found in the
ordinary simple intellect, be it acute or dull.

The brain may be
likened to a parasite which is nourished as a part of the human frame
without contributing directly to its inner economy; it is securely
housed in the topmost story, and there leads a self-sufficient and
independent life. In the same way it may be said that a man endowed
with great mental gifts leads, apart from the individual life common to
all, a second life, purely of the intellect. He devotes himself to the
constant increase, rectification and extension, not of mere learning,
but of real systematic knowledge and insight; and remains untouched by
the fate that overtakes him personally, so long as it does not disturb
him in his work. It is thus a life which raises a man and sets him
above fate and its changes. Always thinking, learning, experimenting,
practicing his knowledge, the man soon comes to look upon this second
life as the chief mode of existence, and his merely personal life as
something subordinate, serving only to advance ends higher than itself.

An
example of this independent, separate existence is furnished by Goethe.
During the war in the Champagne, and amid all the bustle of the camp,
he made observations for his theory of color; and as soon as the
numberless calamities of that war allowed of his retiring for a short
time to the fortress of Luxembourg, he took up the manuscript of his
_Farbenlehre_. This is an example which we, the salt of the earth,
should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the
pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world
may invade and agitate our personal environment; always remembering
that we are the sons, not of the bondwoman, but of the free. As our
emblem and coat of arms, I propose a tree mightily shaken by the wind,
but still bearing its ruddy fruit on every branch; with the motto _Dum
convellor mitescunt_, or _Conquassata sed ferax._

That purely
intellectual life of the individual has its counterpart in humanity as
a whole. For there, too, the real life is the life of the _will_, both
in the empirical and in the transcendental meaning of the word. The
purely intellectual life of humanity lies in its effort to increase
knowledge by means of the sciences, and its desire to perfect the arts.
Both science and art thus advance slowly from one generation to
another, and grow with the centuries, every race as it hurries by
furnishing its contribution. This intellectual life, like some gift
from heaven, hovers over the stir and movement of the world; or it is,
as it were, a sweet-scented air developed out of the ferment
itself--the real life of mankind, dominated by will; and side by side
with the history of nations, the history of philosophy, science and art
takes its innocent and bloodless way.

The difference between the
genius and the ordinary man is, no doubt, a _quantitative_ one, in so
far as it is a difference of degree; but I am tempted to regard it also
as _qualitative_, in view of the fact that ordinary minds,
notwithstanding individual variation, have a certain tendency to think
alike. Thus on similar occasions their thoughts at once all take a
similar direction, and run on the same lines; and this explains why
their judgments constantly agree--not, however, because they are based
on truth. To such lengths does this go that certain fundamental views
obtain amongst mankind at all times, and are always being repeated and
brought forward anew, whilst the great minds of all ages are in open or
secret opposition to them.

A genius is a man in whose mind the
world is presented as an object is presented in a mirror, but with a
degree more of clearness and a greater distinction of outline than is
attained by ordinary people. It is from him that humanity may look for
most instruction; for the deepest insight into the most important
matters is to be acquired, not by an observant attention to detail, but
by a close study of things as a whole. And if his mind reaches
maturity, the instruction he gives will be conveyed now in one form,
now in another. Thus genius may be defined as an eminently clear
consciousness of things in general, and therefore, also of that which
is opposed to them, namely, one's own self.

The world looks up
to a man thus endowed, and expects to learn something about life and
its real nature. But several highly favorable circumstances must
combine to produce genius, and this is a very rare event. It happens
only now and then, let us say once in a century, that a man is born
whose intellect so perceptibly surpasses the normal measure as to
amount to that second faculty which seems to be accidental, as it is
out of all relation to the will. He may remain a long time without
being recognized or appreciated, stupidity preventing the one and envy
the other. But should this once come to pass, mankind will crowd round
him and his works, in the hope that he may be able to enlighten some of
the darkness of their existence or inform them about it. His message
is, to some extent, a revelation, and he himself a higher being, even
though he may be but little above the ordinary standard.

Like
the ordinary man, the genius is what he is chiefly for himself. This is
essential to his nature: a fact which can neither be avoided nor
altered, he may be for others remains a matter of chance and of
secondary importance. In no case can people receive from his mind more
than a reflection, and then only when he joins with them in the attempt
to get his thought into their heads; where, however, it is never
anything but an exotic plant, stunted and frail.

In order to
have original, uncommon, and perhaps even immortal thoughts, it is
enough to estrange oneself so fully from the world of things for a few
moments, that the most ordinary objects and events appear quite new and
unfamiliar. In this way their true nature is disclosed. What is here
demanded cannot, perhaps, be said to be difficult; it is not in our
power at all, but is just the province of genius.

By itself,
genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by
herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify
genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny.

The mind of
genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among precious
stones: it sends forth light of its own, while the others reflect only
that which they have received. The relation of the genius to the
ordinary mind may also be described as that of an idio-electrical body
to one which merely is a conductor of electricity.

The mere man
of learning, who spends his life in teaching what he has learned, is
not strictly to be called a man of genius; just as idio-electrical
bodies are not conductors. Nay, genius stands to mere learning as the
words to the music in a song. A man of learning is a man who has
learned a great deal; a man of genius, one from whom we learn something
which the genius has learned from nobody. Great minds, of which there
is scarcely one in a hundred millions, are thus the lighthouses of
humanity; and without them mankind would lose itself in the boundless
sea of monstrous error and bewilderment.

And so the simple man
of learning, in the strict sense of the word--the ordinary professor,
for instance--looks upon the genius much as we look upon a hare, which
is good to eat after it has been killed and dressed up. So long as it
is alive, it is only good to shoot at.

He who wishes to
experience gratitude from his contemporaries, must adjust his pace to
theirs. But great things are never produced in this way. And he who
wants to do great things must direct his gaze to posterity, and in firm
confidence elaborate his work for coming generations. No doubt, the
result may be that he will remain quite unknown to his contemporaries,
and comparable to a man who, compelled to spend his life upon a lonely
island, with great effort sets up a monument there, to transmit to
future sea-farers the knowledge of his existence. If he thinks it a
hard fate, let him console himself with the reflection that the
ordinary man who lives for practical aims only, often suffers a like
fate, without having any compensation to hope for; inasmuch as he may,
under favorable conditions, spend a life of material production,
earning, buying, building, fertilizing, laying out, founding,
establishing, beautifying with daily effort and unflagging zeal, and
all the time think that he is working for himself; and yet in the end
it is his descendants who reap the benefit of it all, and sometimes not
even his descendants. It is the same with the man of genius; he, too,
hopes for his reward and for honor at least; and at last finds that he
has worked for posterity alone. Both, to be sure, have inherited a
great deal from their ancestors.

The compensation I have
mentioned as the privilege of genius lies, not in what it is to others,
but in what it is to itself. What man has in any real sense lived more
than he whose moments of thought make their echoes heard through the
tumult of centuries? Perhaps, after all, it would be the best thing for
a genius to attain undisturbed possession of himself, by spending his
life in enjoying the pleasure of his own thoughts, his own works, and
by admitting the world only as the heir of his ample existence. Then
the world would find the mark of his existence only after his death, as
it finds that of the Ichnolith.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Translator's
Note._--For an illustration of this feeling in poetry, Schopenhauer
refers the reader to Byron's _Prophecy of Dante_: introd. to C. 4.]

It
is not only in the activity of his highest powers that the genius
surpasses ordinary people. A man who is unusually well-knit, supple and
agile, will perform all his movements with exceptional ease, even with
comfort, because he takes a direct pleasure in an activity for which he
is particularly well-equipped, and therefore often exercises it without
any object. Further, if he is an acrobat or a dancer, not only does he
take leaps which other people cannot execute, but he also betrays rare
elasticity and agility in those easier steps which others can also
perform, and even in ordinary walking. In the same way a man of
superior mind will not only produce thoughts and works which could
never have come from another; it will not be here alone that he will
show his greatness; but as knowledge and thought form a mode of
activity natural and easy to him, he will also delight himself in them
at all times, and so apprehend small matters which are within the range
of other minds, more easily, quickly and correctly than they. Thus he
will take a direct and lively pleasure in every increase of Knowledge,
every problem solved, every witty thought, whether of his own or
another's; and so his mind will have no further aim than to be
constantly active. This will be an inexhaustible spring of delight; and
boredom, that spectre which haunts the ordinary man, can never come
near him.

Then, too, the masterpieces of past and contemporary
men of genius exist in their fullness for him alone. If a great product
of genius is recommended to the ordinary, simple mind, it will take as
much pleasure in it as the victim of gout receives in being invited to
a ball. The one goes for the sake of formality, and the other reads the
book so as not to be in arrear. For La Bruy�re was quite right when he
said: _All the wit in the world is lost upon him who has none_. The
whole range of thought of a man of talent, or of a genius, compared
with the thoughts of the common man, is, even when directed to objects
essentially the same, like a brilliant oil-painting, full of life,
compared with a mere outline or a weak sketch in water-color.

All
this is part of the reward of genius, and compensates him for a lonely
existence in a world with which he has nothing in common and no
sympathies. But since size is relative, it comes to the same thing
whether I say, Caius was a great man, or Caius has to live amongst
wretchedly small people: for Brobdingnack and Lilliput vary only in the
point from which they start. However great, then, however admirable or
instructive, a long posterity may think the author of immortal works,
during his lifetime he will appear to his contemporaries small,
wretched, and insipid in proportion. This is what I mean by saying that
as there are three hundred degrees from the base of a tower to the
summit, so there are exactly three hundred from the summit to the base.
Great minds thus owe little ones some indulgence; for it is only in
virtue of these little minds that they themselves are great.

Let
us, then, not be surprised if we find men of genius generally
unsociable and repellent. It is not their want of sociability that is
to blame. Their path through the world is like that of a man who goes
for a walk on a bright summer morning. He gazes with delight on the
beauty and freshness of nature, but he has to rely wholly on that for
entertainment; for he can find no society but the peasants as they bend
over the earth and cultivate the soil. It is often the case that a
great mind prefers soliloquy to the dialogue he may have in this world.
If he condescends to it now and then, the hollowness of it may possibly
drive him back to his soliloquy; for in forgetfulness of his
interlocutor, or caring little whether he understands or not, he talks
to him as a child talks to a doll.

Modesty in a great mind
would, no doubt, be pleasing to the world; but, unluckily, it is a
_contradictio in adjecto_. It would compel a genius to give the
thoughts and opinions, nay, even the method and style, of the million
preference over his own; to set a higher value upon them; and, wide
apart as they are, to bring his views into harmony with theirs, or even
suppress them altogether, so as to let the others hold the field. In
that case, however, he would either produce nothing at all, or else his
achievements would be just upon a level with theirs. Great, genuine and
extraordinary work can be done only in so far as its author disregards
the method, the thoughts, the opinions of his contemporaries, and
quietly works on, in spite of their criticism, on his side despising
what they praise. No one becomes great without arrogance of this sort.
Should his life and work fall upon a time which cannot recognize and
appreciate him, he is at any rate true to himself; like some noble
traveler forced to pass the night in a miserable inn; when morning
comes, he contentedly goes his way.

A poet or philosopher should
have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his
work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner
granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to
think about other people.

For the brain to be a mere laborer in
the service of the belly, is indeed the common lot of almost all those
who do not live on the work of their hands; and they are far from being
discontented with their lot. But it strikes despair into a man of great
mind, whose brain-power goes beyond the measure necessary for the
service of the will; and he prefers, if need be, to live in the
narrowest circumstances, so long as they afford him the free use of his
time for the development and application of his faculties; in other
words, if they give him the leisure which is invaluable to him.

It
is otherwise with ordinary people: for them leisure has no value in
itself, nor is it, indeed, without its dangers, as these people seem to
know. The technical work of our time, which is done to an unprecedented
perfection, has, by increasing and multiplying objects of luxury, given
the favorites of fortune a choice between more leisure and culture upon
the one side, and additional luxury and good living, but with increased
activity, upon the other; and, true to their character, they choose the
latter, and prefer champagne to freedom. And they are consistent in
their choice; for, to them, every exertion of the mind which does not
serve the aims of the will is folly. Intellectual effort for its own
sake, they call eccentricity. Therefore, persistence in the aims of the
will and the belly will be concentricity; and, to be sure, the will is
the centre, the kernel of the world.

But in general it is very
seldom that any such alternative is presented. For as with money, most
men have no superfluity, but only just enough for their needs, so with
intelligence; they possess just what will suffice for the service of
the will, that is, for the carrying on of their business. Having made
their fortune, they are content to gape or to indulge in sensual
pleasures or childish amusements, cards or dice; or they will talk in
the dullest way, or dress up and make obeisance to one another. And how
few are those who have even a little superfluity of intellectual power!
Like the others they too make themselves a pleasure; but it is a
pleasure of the intellect. Either they will pursue some liberal study
which brings them in nothing, or they will practice some art; and in
general, they will be capable of taking an objective interest in
things, so that it will be possible to converse with them. But with the
others it is better not to enter into any relations at all; for, except
when they tell the results of their own experience or give an account
of their special vocation, or at any rate impart what they have learned
from some one else, their conversation will not be worth listening to;
and if anything is said to them, they will rarely grasp or understand
it aright, and it will in most cases be opposed to their own opinions.
Balthazar Gracian describes them very strikingly as men who are not
men--_hombres che non lo son_. And Giordano Bruno _says_ the same
thing: _What a difference there is in having to do with men compared
with those who are only made in their image and likeness_![1] And how
wonderfully this passage agrees with that remark in the Kurral: _The
common people look like men but I have never seen anything quite like
them_. If the reader will consider the extent to which these ideas
agree in thought and even in expression, and in the wide difference
between them in point of date and nationality, he cannot doubt but that
they are at one with the facts of life. It was certainly not under the
influence of those passages that, about twenty years ago, I tried to
get a snuff-box made, the lid of which should have two fine chestnuts
represented upon it, if possible in mosaic; together with a leaf which
was to show that they were horse-chestnuts. This symbol was meant to
keep the thought constantly before my mind. If anyone wishes for
entertainment, such as will prevent him feeling solitary even when he
is alone, let me recommend the company of dogs, whose moral and
intellectual qualities may almost afford delight and gratification.

[Footnote 1: Opera: ed. Wagner, 1. 224.]

Still,
we should always be careful to avoid being unjust. I am often surprised
by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity of my dog; and I
have similar experiences with mankind. Countless times, in indignation
at their incapacity, their total lack of discernment, their bestiality,
I have been forced to echo the old complaint that folly is the mother
and the nurse of the human race:

_Humani generis mater nutrixque profecto
Stultitia est_.

But
at other times I have been astounded that from such a race there could
have gone forth so many arts and sciences, abounding in so much use and
beauty, even though it has always been the few that produce them. Yet
these arts and sciences have struck root, established and perfected
themselves: and the race has with persistent fidelity preserved Homer,
Plato, Horace and others for thousands of years, by copying and
treasuring their writings, thus saving them from oblivion, in spite of
all the evils and atrocities that have happened in the world. Thus the
race has proved that it appreciates the value of these things, and at
the same time it can form a correct view of special achievements or
estimate signs of judgment and intelligence. When this takes place
amongst those who belong to the great multitude, it is by a kind of
inspiration. Sometimes a correct opinion will be formed by the
multitude itself; but this is only when the chorus of praise has grown
full and complete. It is then like the sound of untrained voices; where
there are enough of them, it is always harmonious.

Those who
emerge from the multitude, those who are called men of genius, are
merely the _lucida intervalla_ of the whole human race. They achieve
that which others could not possibly achieve. Their originality is so
great that not only is their divergence from others obvious, but their
individuality is expressed with such force, that all the men of genius
who have ever existed show, every one of them, peculiarities of
character and mind; so that the gift of his works is one which he alone
of all men could ever have presented to the world. This is what makes
that simile of Ariosto's so true and so justly celebrated: _Natura lo
fece e poi ruppe lo stampo._ After Nature stamps a man of genius, she
breaks the die.

But there is always a limit to human capacity;
and no one can be a great genius without having some decidedly weak
side, it may even be, some intellectual narrowness. In other words,
there will foe some faculty in which he is now and then inferior to men
of moderate endowments. It will be a faculty which, if strong, might
have been an obstacle to the exercise of the qualities in which he
excels. What this weak point is, it will always be hard to define with
any accuracy even in a given case. It may be better expressed
indirectly; thus Plato's weak point is exactly that in which Aristotle
is strong, and _vice versa_; and so, too, Kant is deficient just where
Goethe is great.

Now, mankind is fond of venerating something;
but its veneration is generally directed to the wrong object, and it
remains so directed until posterity comes to set it right. But the
educated public is no sooner set right in this, than the honor which is
due to genius degenerates; just as the honor which the faithful pay to
their saints easily passes into a frivolous worship of relics.
Thousands of Christians adore the relics of a saint whose life and
doctrine are unknown to them; and the religion of thousands of
Buddhists lies more in veneration of the Holy Tooth or some such
object, or the vessel that contains it, or the Holy Bowl, or the fossil
footstep, or the Holy Tree which Buddha planted, than in the thorough
knowledge and faithful practice of his high teaching. Petrarch's house
in Arqua; Tasso's supposed prison in Ferrara; Shakespeare's house in
Stratford, with his chair; Goethe's house in Weimar, with its
furniture; Kant's old hat; the autographs of great men; these things
are gaped at with interest and awe by many who have never read their
works. They cannot do anything more than just gape.

The
intelligent amongst them are moved by the wish to see the objects which
the great man habitually had before his eyes; and by a strange
illusion, these produce the mistaken notion that with the objects they
are bringing back the man himself, or that something of him must cling
to them. Akin to such people are those who earnestly strive to acquaint
themselves with the subject-matter of a poet's works, or to unravel the
personal circumstances and events in his life which have suggested
particular passages. This is as though the audience in a theatre were
to admire a fine scene and then rush upon the stage to look at the
scaffolding that supports it. There are in our day enough instances of
these critical investigators, and they prove the truth of the saying
that mankind is interested, not in the _form_ of a work, that is, in
its manner of treatment, but in its actual matter. All it cares for is
the theme. To read a philosopher's biography, instead of studying his
thoughts, is like neglecting a picture and attending only to the style
of its frame, debating whether it is carved well or ill, and how much
it cost to gild it.

This is all very well. However, there is
another class of persons whose interest is also directed to material
and personal considerations, but they go much further and carry it to a
point where it becomes absolutely futile. Because a great man has
opened up to them the treasures of his inmost being, and, by a supreme
effort of his faculties, produced works which not only redound to their
elevation and enlightenment, but will also benefit their posterity to
the tenth and twentieth generation; because he has presented mankind
with a matchless gift, these varlets think themselves justified in
sitting in judgment upon his personal morality, and trying if they
cannot discover here or there some spot in him which will soothe the
pain they feel at the sight of so great a mind, compared with the
overwhelming feeling of their own nothingness.

This is the real
source of all those prolix discussions, carried on in countless books
and reviews, on the moral aspect of Goethe's life, and whether he ought
not to have married one or other of the girls with whom he fell in love
in his young days; whether, again, instead of honestly devoting himself
to the service of his master, he should not have been a man of the
people, a German patriot, worthy of a seat in the _Paulskirche_, and so
on. Such crying ingratitude and malicious detraction prove that these
self-constituted judges are as great knaves morally as they are
intellectually, which is saying a great deal.

A man of talent
will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius
to the production of its works is not as easy to name. Wealth is seldom
its reward. Nor is it reputation or glory; only a Frenchman could mean
that. Glory is such an uncertain thing, and, if you look at it closely,
of so little value. Besides it never corresponds to the effort you have
made:

_Responsura tuo nunquam est par fama labori._

Nor,
again, is it exactly the pleasure it gives you; for this is almost
outweighed by the greatness of the effort. It is rather a peculiar kind
of instinct, which drives the man of genius to give permanent form to
what he sees and feels, without being conscious of any further motive.
It works, in the main, by a necessity similar to that which makes a
tree bear its fruit; and no external condition is needed but the ground
upon which it is to thrive.

On a closer examination, it seems as
though, in the case of a genius, the will to live, which is the spirit
of the human species, were conscious of having, by some rare chance,
and for a brief period, attained a greater clearness of vision, and
were now trying to secure it, or at least the outcome of it, for the
whole species, to which the individual genius in his inmost being
belongs; so that the light which he sheds about him may pierce the
darkness and dullness of ordinary human consciousness and there produce
some good effect.

Arising in some such way, this instinct drives
the genius to carry his work to completion, without thinking of reward
or applause or sympathy; to leave all care for his own personal
welfare; to make his life one of industrious solitude, and to strain
his faculties to the utmost. He thus comes to think more about
posterity than about contemporaries; because, while the latter can only
lead him astray, posterity forms the majority of the species, and time
will gradually bring the discerning few who can appreciate him.
Meanwhile it is with him as with the artist described by Goethe; he has
no princely patron to prize his talents, no friend to rejoice with him:

His
work is, as it were, a sacred object and the true fruit of his life,
and his aim in storing it away for a more discerning posterity will be
to make it the property of mankind. An aim like this far surpasses all
others, and for it he wears the crown of thorns which is one day to
bloom into a wreath of laurel. All his powers are concentrated in the
effort to complete and secure his work; just as the insect, in the last
stage of its development, uses its whole strength on behalf of a brood
it will never live to see; it puts its eggs in some place of safety,
where, as it well knows, the young will one day find life and
nourishment, and then dies in confidence.